


Don’t Mistake My Charity for What It Is, Don’t Mistake My Open Arms for What They Are

by MrsCalculation



Series: You Know Where to Find Me [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (Bear with me), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Clint is Steve's Depression Friend, Gen, M/M, Tinder, winter soldier - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-11-18 18:07:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 22,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11295972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrsCalculation/pseuds/MrsCalculation
Summary: It starts with a shadow and an impossible shot, a shot that definitely wasn’t from his sniper.Bucky doesn't fall from the train but dies with Schmidt on the Valkyrie.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "You Know Where to Find Me" by Imogen Heap, the incredible artist who originally performed what is now known as the "Mmm whatcha say" song.
> 
> So! I've had this idea for a while and had writer's block on my personal projects, so I decided to give this a shot. I've never published fic before, but my whole job is writing, so I thought this would be a fun thing to try to make.

It starts with a shadow and an impossible shot. Bucky is grounded from a new arm wound that makes it impossible to climb, and Dernier wasn’t slippery enough this time, and they have no one in the trees to take this guy down before he kills Dernier and alerts his base.

Before Steve can call out orders, before he can call out to one of his men for help, before he even knows what the first word out of his mouth would be, the guy is suddenly down. Steve sees Dernier look around, shocked at the impossibility, then hears him whistle their signal: they’re clear. 

Steve looks over to Bucky, who has finished scrambling at his shoulder long enough for Morita to patch the wound. They both look just as confused when they hear the signal. Steve meets Bucky’s eye and he frowns, his _I didn’t do it_ and _what the fuck_ frown in one, and gestures for them to stay against their tree.

“Barnes, Morita, you stay here. Look for that shooter. Do not engage unless provoked.”

They nod. Steve takes off with Jones, Dugan, and Falsworth without any other confirmation. He doesn’t need it.

Steve forgets about the shooter as they destroy yet another base. When Steve’s team rendezvous with Bucky and Morita, both groups empty-handed, they decide not to tell Phillips, but Steve knows he’ll talk to Peggy about it. Until then, he forgets.

 

He forgets until they’re on a train and he’s down, unable to hold onto his shield with the latest blast. There’s a hole in the train where the beam ricocheted, and Bucky is alone behind Steve’s shield, trying to defend him as always.

Someone swings into the train from the hole just as Bucky is lining up to take a shot he’s never going to make, not against this huge _thing_ ( _that can’t be a man, it’s too big to be a man_ , Steve keeps thinking) in armor shooting its giant blasts of blue light that somehow have _mass_. This someone swings in behind Bucky and gives that armored thing a distraction for just long enough that Bucky doesn’t get shot.

At least, not by the mass of blue light.

The _someone_ , every inch covered in a black suit almost like Steve’s, pulls Bucky back by his jacket and grabs the shield away from him, using it to guard themself. Then they push Bucky forward as they line up a shot straight through Bucky that knocks him down, but that ends up hitting the armored thing. Bucky goes down as the someone rushes the armor, pulling them both out of the train. 

“No!” Steve shouts as he rushes to the hole in the train. He sees the armor falling, but the someone is gone.

Steve rushes back to Bucky and starts to put pressure on his wound. It was an impossible shot straight through his hip and to the knee of that armored thing, but Bucky doesn’t seem to notice the bleeding much. He instead looks a confused sort of panicked, staring at the hole in the train and hardly acknowledging Steve as he tears through Bucky’s clothes to get a closer look at the wound.

“I’m fine, Steve, it’s straight through, just help me up,” he says as he swats at Steve’s hands. Steve considers for a moment yelling at him that he is clearly _not_ fine, but he doesn’t. Instead he hoists Bucky up and walks him forward into a part of the train that doesn’t have a giant cold breeze rushing through it. He can panic when they’re safer.

He puts Bucky down on a crate, telling him to keep pressure on the wound, that he’ll be back as soon as he finds Jones with Zola. He leaves him with his shield and extra guns despite Bucky’s protests that Steve needs them more.

He takes off while Bucky yells after him, “Rogers, you fucking idiot! Rogers!”

When Steve gets back to Bucky only a few minutes later (he keep repeating to himself that it’s only been a few minutes, Bucky is fine, he made the right choice, Bucky is going to be okay), Bucky is giving him his iciest glare even as he puts pressure on his own wound that must be causing him extreme pain.

“What the fuck, Steve, you can’t just leave me like that when there’s a fucking _maniac_ who just fucking _shot me_ around!”

“We’ll worry about that later,” Steve says as he picks Bucky up again despite the protests and heads up, back to the extraction point.

They don’t talk about it later, but they sure as hell keep their promise to worry.

 

They don’t avoid talking about it. They just don’t have time.

Based on Zola’s intel, they have a little more than a week before Schmidt moves to attack the United States. Other than the strange face of shock Zola had when he saw Bucky with Steve, Steve hasn’t had time to worry about anything else.

He expected Bucky to hate seeing Zola, but for Zola to look so afraid and confused at seeing Bucky? He isn’t sure he wants to know what that’s about.

By the time they have a plan of attack to stop the _Valkyrie,_  the only non-strategic discussion Steve and Bucky have had has been about his leg. Bucky had insisted he was fine to go on this mission, that he needs to be there in person when Steve’s dumb ass gets killed, while Steve had argued that there was no way a bullet wound could have healed well enough in a week no matter how clean it had been. Steve, unfortunately, lost this argument, mostly because Phillips wanted Bucky backing Steve up on his suicide run. Steve hadn’t wanted to tell Phillips about the extent of Bucky’s injuries without Bucky’s permission, so he just shut up and let it happen.

It was just about the only time that Steve hadn’t spoken his mind, and he had never regretted it more.

They had made their way through the base, found Schmidt, and boarded the _Valkyrie._  During the fight, though, Schmidt had gone for the cube.

Bucky had tried to stop him.

Steve had watched as Bucky had tackled Schmidt to the ground, right arm wrapped around his neck and the left trying to bat the cube away from him. And now he’s listening to Bucky scream as a portal to what looks like _actual outer space what the fuck_ opens up and Bucky and Schmidt both disappear.

He shouts and frantically searches for any sign of Bucky, but the only thing he finds is the cube burning its way through the metal of the plane and falling into the ocean. Steve wants to follow it down and even considers it for a moment before turning back to the control panel.

The next thing he knows, he’s hearing some of his team’s voices trying to get through to him as he realizes he has to go down with the plane. Peggy gets through to him first.

“Peggy? Peggy, Schmidt’s dead!”

“What about the plane? Is Barnes with you?”

Steve hesitates a second before saying, “No. No, Peggy, he went down with Schmidt. They’re both gone.” Gone, literally _gone_ , he looked for them he can’t find them Peggy Bucky is dead and now I’m going to die Peggy— 

“Steve! Steve, calm down, give me your coordinates and I’ll try to find you a safe landing site.”

“There's not going to be a safe landing. But I can try to force it down.” _Please just let me force it down I don’t know how to live without him_

“I'll get Howard on the line, he'll know what to do.”

“There's not enough time,” Steve says. He’s lying. “This thing's moving too fast and it's headed for New York. I gotta put her in the water.” _Stop lying to her there’s a chance you can make it stop lying_

“Please, don't do this. We have time. We can work it out.” Steve can hear her voice breaking. He hates that he’s doing this to her.

“Right now I'm in the middle of nowhere. If I wait any longer a lot of people are gonna die. Peggy, this is my choice.” He doesn’t get an answer. He thinks she knows why he wants this. “Peggy?”

“I'm here.”

“I'm gonna need a rain check on that dance.”

“All right. A week, next Saturday, at the Stork Club.” He can definitely hear tears in her voice now.

“You got it.”

“Eight o'clock on the dot, don't you dare be late! Understood?”

“You know, I still don't know how to dance.” _Bucky never taught me you know that? Bucky never taught me because I only ever wanted to dance with him I would only get one chance with him I didn’t want to lose it Bucky never—_

“I'll show you how. Just be there.”

“We'll have the band play somethin' slow. I'd hate to step on your—”

Steve smiles as the plane strikes the ice.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave comments with feedback if you'd like! I'm not used to writing characters who already exist, so if anything comes across as weird or wrong, I'd like to fix it! All mistakes are mine and I want to fix them.  
> I'm not sure how regular of an update schedule this will have, or if anyone will even care about it. I thought if I published the first chapter it would force me to keep writing. So far I have everything outlined and know exactly where it's going to go, so... be patient with me. It may get a little weird. Not everything I have planned is tagged yet because spoilers.  
> Thank you for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: Steve keeps telling himself he's dead, there is some glossed-over canonical violence, and Steve kinda has a crush on Sam. If that's a no for you, click away, but nothing is acted upon here!
> 
> Thank you for the response so far!!!

Steve woke up in a weird new place that wasn’t actually as weird as he thought it would be, and he’s trying to figure out how things got like this and why he’s still alive, and then aliens attack. He decides he’s dead after all. How else could any of this be happening? It can’t. He’s dead.

Maybe he died when they put him in that pod. Nothing that had happened since then seemed real. He thinks he’s seen actual fucking outer space from the cockpit of a plane, Jesus Christ, nothing is real.

He fights the aliens, though, and even though he kind of hates them all, he actually loves his new team. He’s not going to tell them that since they’re all terrible, except maybe Dr. Banner, but he thinks they work well and that, no matter how they may act, their hearts are in the right place.

Steve has got to be dead. He put his trust in a giant alien god from another world. He even kind of likes this alien god thing.

He decides, since he’s dead and has every right to do whatever he wants with his afterlife, that living in Brooklyn isn’t a good idea anymore. He’ll visit sometimes. Tony had offered him a place in the tower that had been partially destroyed in the battle, so he promises to stay with him next time he’s in New York. Since Tony went through all that effort. He’s definitely his least favorite on the team, but also his favorite since he’s a little like his own son, since he knew Howard so well.

He _misses_ Howard and has to stop thinking of Tony as a son figure when technically Tony is older than Steve is, Jesus Christ, he’s got to get out of New York.

Fury’s main headquarters is in DC, which works out well for him since Peggy’s nursing home is there, too. He can visit someone who remembers him from before. Or not. But it’s still nice to have that link to his past there but not haunting him like echoes on the now-changed Brooklyn streets did.

So he works for Fury, playing war when there is none and adjusting to a new life. He thinks it’s weird that everyone in this new life thinks they know who he is when they don’t, but it isn’t as bad as he thought it would be. As it turns out, most people don’t recognize him on the street, so when he’s out of uniform, he can shape his own life.

Of course, shaping his life means letting people of this century know that Steve Rogers is an _asshole_. Which is how he ends up meeting Sam Wilson.

Steve likes Sam. He’s the first person not to treat Steve like The Captain, but like a kind of confused guy still getting on his feet. He teases Steve endlessly while never once actually being rude, which is more than can be said for Steve. Steve almost made the guy’s heart go out trying to show off to him that first day.

Despite their personality differences, Steve and Sam get along. Steve hadn’t had an easy-going friendship, one that didn’t bloom out of team survival… ever, he thinks. And he finds Sam a simple sort of beautiful, too, even though he’s not ready to tell him that yet. He doesn’t know how Sam feels about that sort of thing, even if it looks like this century is a lot more relaxed about it than Steve’s lifetime ever was.

Those feelings are a lot of why Steve wants to keep his personal life as separate as he can from his Captain America life, and it’s why he hates so much when, after a few months, he has to go and drag Sam into it.

He and Natasha have nowhere to go and Steve had just found out that he had died—that Bucky had died—for nothing. Natasha isn't sure who she can go to, Fury is dead, and Captain America is suddenly wanted, so Steve goes to the one person outside his Captain America life, the one person he can trust. Which means dragging Sam into it.

“Captain America needs my help. There's no better reason to get back in.”

Steve's heart sinks a bit at the words. He had thought he was more than just Captain America to Sam.

“Captain America has needed your help before,” Steve says, “but he's never dragged you back into the fight.”

Sam doesn't miss a beat. “Captain America has never needed me before, I've never seen any Captain America around here. It's always been Steve Rogers.”

Steve smiles and decides yeah. They can trust him.

Trusting Sam turns out to be the best decision Steve had made in this century.

Sam is quick and beautifully efficient and always has Steve’s back, even when he jumps out of planes without a parachute. Sam yells at Steve for that later, of course, but because he was concerned for Steve, not for an American icon.

Steve and Natasha agree that they never could have stopped the helicarriers without Sam, and Maria Hill wants to make him part of a new team. Sam graciously turns her down, but he doesn't cut out contact with them.

It's Steve who ends up doing that.

Not long after the helicarrier fight, before Steve is even out of the hospital, he gets a call from Tony.

“Rogers. Did you know about this?”

Steve groans internally. He doesn’t know what Tony is talking about with his serious voice for once, and he kind of wants just 24 hours of consciousness and non-drug-induced sleep before dealing with the next crisis.

“Rogers, hello, are you there? Steve. Steve, Barnes was alive.”

“What?” Steve asks, extremely eloquent between his shocked confusion and the severe pain he's in. Of course Bucky was alive, Steve saw him live and die right in front of him.

“Barnes. The files Romanov leaked, he's in them. A lot. He was alive.”

Steve tries to sit up and instead suppresses a groan of pain from his not-healed gut wound. “What do you mean, Tony?” he asks.

“He's in these files, Steve. They… they caught him. They turned him. Experimented on him. He killed my parents.”

“What? Tony, no,” Steve says, refusing to believe. Bucky had _loved_ Howard, not that he would have admitted it. Even if he hadn't been sucked through to space and died, he never would have killed him.

(Maybe punch him in the face once for experimenting on Steve, ha ha that never happened, but kill him?)

“I can hear your brain trying to work, Rogers, and it's painful, just get here as soon as you can. Clean out those cobwebs and get yourself together. Let me know when you're ready, I'll have a plane waiting for you. Just get here.” Tony hangs up.

  
Steves stares at his phone before sending a text to Natasha asking if Tony had talked to her. He silences his phone and tries to sleep, deciding that he needs rest if he's going to discharge himself from here and get back to New York as soon as possible.


	3. Chapter 3

Natasha was there to see Steve almost immediately after he fell asleep, and he got the feeling she'd been waiting for an excuse stop putting out fires and check on him.

“Hey, how are you feeling?” she asks him as she closes the door. She sounds like she's just being polite, but Steve can see underneath she's been worried. They'd finally become friends more than just teammates.

“Like I got shot,” Steve says, and Natasha snorts as he sees her concern fade away.

“What did you wanna talk about? Stark hasn't contacted me.” At that she frowns a little. She'd been working with Stark for a while, longer than Steve has been out of the ice. “Did he find something?”

Steve nods sideways, agreeing only slightly. “He says he has, yeah. Do you know how Howard died? He says… he says he knows who killed him.”

Natasha’s face goes blank. It's an obvious tell, but Steve doesn't know what for. “Yeah, Steve. I've known who killed him for a long time. I figured it out a few years ago.”

“Who?” He knows it can't be Bucky. He'd died so long ago to everyone else in this world. Howard had lived a whole life while Steve and Bucky were both dead.

Natasha doesn't answer him immediately. When she does, it isn't helpful. “They called him the Winter Soldier. He's been credited with dozens of assassinations over the past fifty years. He shot me once. There have been no reports of him in years, though.”

“Fifty years. Fifty years? Natasha, that can't be true. That's a ghost story.”

“Yeah,” she says, “one used to keep little Russian assassins-in-training in line. He's real, Steve, or he was. Talk to Stark on this.” She moves to leave.

“Natasha,” Steve says as she reaches for the handle. She stops with her back to him “Natasha. You don't have to tell me what you know. But if you know what Stark is talking about… if you know what he told me, you can't expect me to stay out here.”

She nods and is out the door before Steve can say anything else.

 

Sam comes back to visit, just keeping Steve company as he stares at the ceiling and thinks too hard.

“Steve, man, I can hear your teeth grinding. What's up?”

Oh. Steve realizes he has been clenching his jaw. Thanks, Sam.

“I don't know yet,” Steve tells him. “I'm gonna have to go back to New York to figure that out.”

Sam pauses for a second, not in the _I’m shocked and don't know what to say_ way, but in the _I’m genuinely considering what you've said and what I know about you_ way. Steve appreciates it. After his legitimate consideration, Sam settles on, “I don't know if that's good for you, but I don't know if you staying here when you clearly think the answers _aren't_ here is any better.” He hums for a beat, then continues with, “just promise you aren't throwing yourself straight into a firefight before you're recovered from this one.”

Steve chuckles and says, “I don't intend to, but no guarantees.”

Sam grins at him, genuine and gap-toothed and a sort of smile reserved only for your best friends, and Steve is suddenly painfully sad to leave him behind. “All right, man, that's fair. Hey, you wanna watch a movie?”

And that's how Steve ends up watching _How to Train Your Dragon_ for the first time, making fun of Sam for his near-obsession with the music, forgetting for a while that the future isn't okay.

 

Two days later and he can't forget anymore. He is by no means fully recovered, but the worst of his injuries no longer require hospitalization, and he's deemed fit for discharge by the next morning. He texts Tony.

**TS: I'll send a car for you straight to the airport. Private jet, short flight, another car straight to the tower. See you soon.**

Steve still isn't used to Tony getting straight to the point of something, so he appreciates it now before it's ruined for him in the impending disaster.

Sam comes to help Steve on his way out. Before he can even get out of bed, though, Sam demands Steve unlock his phone and hand it over.

“Uh… Sam, what are you doing?”

“Logging you into my iTunes. _How to Train Your Dragon 2_ is on there.”

Steve laughs, and when he gets up, he pulls Sam into the best hug he can manage.

“Dude,” Sam says when Steve lets him go, “a guy with a couple of bullet wounds shouldn't be able to hug that hard. You work out?”

Steve laughs again as Sam helps him outside and avoids the prickly feeling in his eyes.

 

Between the car ride and the flight, Steve has enough time to finish the movie, and when he lands in New York, he immediately texts Sam.

**SR: What the fuck I didn't know your children's movie would make me cry like that**

**SW: Ha! Cant believe I missed it, dude**

Maybe Steve won't miss him that much after all.

 

Steve scans his way into the tower, greeted politely by JARVIS in the elevator. JARVIS takes Steve straight to his own floor and he steps out into the hallway, deciding to go into the gym and shield-slinging range side instead of down the hall to his living space. Tony is already waiting for him when he gets there.

“Rogers! Let me look at you. Yep, just as ugly as ever, what did Dad see in you? Wait, don't answer that, I don't want to know. How was your flight?”

Wow. Steve holds in a sigh. “Comfortable, except for the part where a friend made me cry with kids’ movies. So what's going on, Tony?”

“Ohh, Wilson, right? Nat has told me all about your boy toy and I can't believe I haven't met him yet, I need to see you knocked down a peg.”

There goes getting straight to the point. Steve blames himself for this one.

“You haven't met him because I'm trying my best not to mix work life and personal life, thank you. Stark. What did you need?” Steve rarely calls Tony _Stark_ in personal settings. He wants Tony to know that Steve is aware that Howard and Tony are not the same person. But now is not the time.

“Not shitting where you eat, sound enough, but he won't go without me forever. I'll run a full background check on him, I mean, did I say that? Anyway! About Dad! Barnes!”

Jesus Christ, Steve would just warn Sam about the background check later if it meant getting to the point now. He’s not even sure Tony will remember if he doesn't put up a fight about it.

“Okay,” Tony says, speaking at a much more indoor-appropriate volume at a reasonable human speed, “Romanov dropped a lot of files. Tons. Have you had the chance to look over any?”

“No,” Steve says, barely suppressing an eye roll. “I've been in the hospital since it happened.”

Tony waves a hand. “Excuses. Let's take a look, shall we?”

 

Steve really wishes he could go back to fighting aliens. It would be so much easier than dealing with _this._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Yes I know that How to Train Your Dragon 2 probably wouldn't have been out by mid 2014 which is approximately when this takes place because TWS came out then, but this is an alternate universe and we don't need to worry about that)
> 
> Please leave kudos if you enjoy so I know to keep this up!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a super glossed-over description of torture in this chapter.  
> If you're still reading, thanks for sticking with me this far!

Steve is infuriated. He's fucking  _ pissed. _ He's going to raze every Hydra base he can find.

He almost hopes he dies in the process, but he doesn't deserve that. He tried when he first thought Bucky had died, but he was wrong. He had tried to die and left Bucky to rot. He hates himself. He deserves to live knowing he failed.

Tony had let him see the files he was talking about, and Steve had been horrified at the amount of destruction one person could do, and even more disturbed by the conditions in which that person was kept.

And then he saw the videos.

The files had contained video. The earlier files had code names and low-quality photography and information that reminded Steve just a bit too much of Azzano, but the more recent the files got, the better quality they became.

By the 1990s, Steve couldn't deny it anymore. That was  _ Bucky. _

He saw video of them slicing Bucky open and sewing him back up, video of them beating him, video of burning him with acid.

He saw video of how they made him forget it all, and then they did it again.

Bucky was dehumanized, called  _ The Subject _ and  _ The Weapon _ so they could excuse their violence. Steve saw the way Bucky reacted, accepting that he was meat meant to be abused, offering up less and less protest as the years went on because it was all he knew.

Steve didn't want to think about the way he lost his arm.

(He already knows, but he can't think, won't think, he'll pretend he didn't leave Bucky like that he thinks Bucky would have thought the same he thinks he thinks he thinks)

It's a sick irony that Tony comforts Steve through the video of Bucky killing Howard.

Steve doesn't feel guilty that Bucky’s file shows him missing, presumed dead, during a 2008 terrorist attack during a National Convention. He's horrified at the amount of damage done, but relieved that all files from that point on indicate the loss of their “asset.”

Steve is going to be sick.

 

Steve and Tony make a plan. They'll wait for the dust to settle, let their team regroup after the collapse of SHIELD to see who's on board. They make maps of potential Hydra bases and their priority level and make plans of who they can take alive in different situations.

Then they have nothing to do but wait.

Steve is far from fully healed, definitely not well enough to launch a full-scale attack on an international terrorist organization, and Tony has JARVIS running algorithms to make sure they hit as many bases as quickly as possible. But after a few days, Steve feels like he's going to lose his mind in the tower.

He thinks about calling Sam, but he doesn't want him involved. He had already done more than enough, and he had his own life to live and people to take care of. Steve couldn't rip that out from under him. He calls Clint instead.

“Hey, Cap, what's going on,” Clint more yells than asks when he picks up.

“Oh, you know. Pretending Hydra hasn't ruined my life and that I didn't just get out of the hospital, the usual.” He hears Clint laugh, short and genuine, on the other end. “How are you holding up?”

“I'm alive, which is better than most days. Come on, man, come over. You can beat my ass at pool again.”

 

Steve is out of the tower and to Clint’s place in Bed-Stuy as fast as he can be, with a promise from JARVIS to keep him updated if anything happens.

Clint is shoving a beer into Steve’s hand before he's even through the door. “Rough day?” Steve asks him.

“Nah,” Clint says, “just the usual shit.”

Steve hums in understanding and sips at his beer. He's been to Clint’s before, when he visited from DC, and he knows how rough it had been for Clint to get settled after the whole alien god mind control thing. Steve doesn't know what that was like, of course, but he understands better than most how it is to return to consciousness with time missing.

“How's the future treating you, man? Finally getting the hang of it?”

Steve would be pissed if anyone else asked him that, but he knows Clint is just making fun of him for how bad he was at Mario Kart last time he was over. Not his fault he had never played a video game before. He puts on his best old man voice. “You know, son… I'm still not sure how to work my portable telephone… Back in my day we just yelled as loud as we could to get someone's attention… Good ol’ days…” He trails off and stares wistfully at the ceiling, ignoring the ominous greenish stain there for the sake of the joke.

Steve’s act has the intended effect of making Clint laugh, and he sees some of the tension in the lines around his eyes relax. He’s glad to help, even as little as it is.

“Oh my god, shut up, gimme that back,” Clint says, grabbing for Steve’s beer. Steve twists slightly to be out of Clint's reach, then downs the rest in one long pull and drops the empty bottle back into Clint’s hands. Clint blinks and looks up to the ceiling. “Asshole,” he huffs out.

“Yeah you are. I thought I came here to give you a chance to redeem yourself, not drink all your booze.”

 

Twenty minutes later and Clint has only had the chance to shoot once. Instead of bothering to shoot again, Steve hip-checks the pool table and smiles smugly as the last two balls go into the pockets in the correct order.

Clint points at him. “You’re paying for that later.”

 

After some competitive Mario Kart-ing that ends up in a tie (Steve  _ absolutely _ hadn’t played with Sam to prepare for this day), Clint looks over to Steve’s seat on the floor from his upside-down perch on the couch and says, “Steve, gimme your phone.”

“Why does everyone always want my phone?” Steve asks him, but obliges anyway.

“Because you’re more trusting than the rest of us. You’re  _ never _ supposed to give someone your phone, man, rule number one of having a phone. Hey, do you have a Facebook?”

Not bothering to hide his eye roll, Steve nods. “I don’t use it. Kind of hard to when your whole life needs to be secret all the time. Why?”

“Just wondering, dude,” Clint says as he continues to fiddle around with Steve’s phone. Steve stares at him for a second, then gets back to his Mario Kart race, not stopping just because Clint gave up. He’s playing this game for completion whether Clint likes it or not.

After a few minutes of intense focus on both sides (“this game wouldn’t be so hard if you played as someone besides Baby Mario, Steven,” “Shut up, he’s cute,  _ Clinton _ ”), Clint flips off the couch and sits next to Steve on the floor. “Finished!”

“Uh. Finished with what, exactly?” Steve asks.

“Your new Tinder profile,” Clint says.

Steve just blinks at him. “What.”

“Tinder. It’s a dating app. I’m making you meet new people. You’ve already swiped right on, like, ten guys, but I couldn’t find me.”

Yeah, like that helps. “Clint. What?”

“I got bored. None of them were hot enough, but I figured I'd give them a chance.”

“Barton,” Steve says, finally pausing the game to look Clint in the eye, “what are you talking about?”

Clint breaks his charade and busts into a grin. “Oh my god, I can  _ hear _ the multiple question marks in your voice, holy shit! I told you you'd pay for cheating at pool and you’re the one who said your portable phone was giving you trouble.”

Steve gives Clint his best  _ Captain America is unamused with your shit, son _  face, which just makes Clint laugh harder. Steve slaps him once between the shoulder blades, then decides to let it run its course.

“Care to explain yourself?” he asks when Clint stops choking on his own spit.

“Nope. Left for no, right for yes, and don't you dare delete the app until you've found me.” Clint drops the phone into Steve's lap.

“O…kay?”

 

A few hours and a few mountains of delivery foods later, Steve decides it’s time to leave. “Haven’t heard from Stark all day, I’m getting worried that he exploded or something,” he tells Clint.

Clint isn’t coming back with him, of course. He’s never said anything about it, but Steve is pretty sure Clint avoids the tower unless absolutely necessary. 

If someone follows Steve on the short walk from Clint’s building to the subway station, he doesn’t notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I updated some tags! I may keep updating them as the story goes on, so be on the lookout!  
> Sorry my updates are always so short :( is there a fanfiction etiquette for chapter lengths that I should know?  
> Believe it or not, when I was doing some research for this story, I decided on Bed-Stuy as a setting before I remembered that that's where Clint's building is in Fraction's run of Hawkeye.  
> Also, I wrote an outline of this story from another character's point of view. Maybe when I finish this one, I can write that one for y'all? If you end up liking this one, that is.  
> Thank you all!!!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter is up a bit later. It's been a rough day. I hope to get another one up tomorrow, but who knows since this took me longer than planned. Also, it's unedited, so let me know if you see any errors!

It was quiet when Steve got back to the tower. The business day was over, but it wasn’t that late. He had asked JARVIS how Tony was doing, and had heard back that he was fine, passed out on a work desk and not to be disturbed. Steve wondered how long it had been since Tony had slept.

So instead of bothering Tony, Steve is in his room, staring up at the ceiling and, surprise surprise, thinking about Bucky.

He texts Sam to get his mind off it.

**SW: you been crying over cartoons so long you forget about me or something???**

Oops. 

**SR: Sorry, Sam. First few days were rough. How have you been?**

**SW: Nah dude I get it. I’m here if you need me. But running is a lot easier without you around.**

Steve chuckles, and before he gets the chance to respond, Sam sends him an image.

**SW: Look it’s you**

The .gif is of a sad lab puppy with a treat on its nose that it can’t quite lick off.

**SR: where do you find these things?**

**SW: Internet, so helpful, been reading that a lot**

Steve copies every impolite emoji he can find into one text.

 

Even after talking to Sam about a whole lot of nothing, Steve isn’t relaxed enough to sleep. He ends up opening Tinder just to see what Clint had been talking about and snorts at what he finds. Clint had made his main picture one of Steve staring intently at the TV screen, Mario Kart clearly on display. Only about a quarter of Steve's face was visible, though. Nice.

He looks through his profile to see what it's about. “Steve, 29,” it reads, which is technically accurate. He doesn't think too much about his age anymore, especially because of those extra months tacked onto those 67 years of sleep. “Brooklyn born, but I live in DC. Back in NYC for work. I'll buy you food if you let me win at video games.” There are a couple of pictures of Steve from behind, including one Sam took of him at the Washington Monument. Other than a picture Natasha had taken of him and Sam once, both of them laughing hysterically at something they'd seen in the park, none of the pictures show Steve's face, and even that one is covered up with sunglasses. Clint did a pretty good job of keeping up Steve's privacy.

Steve changes a couple settings, trimming the distance down to fifteen miles and his interests to men  _ and _ women, then closes the app. He gets on Buzzfeed to play “Which Avenger are You Really?” before he finally falls asleep.

 

He doesn't sleep much, which works out well because Tony calls him before 7am wanting to go over a plan of attack.

“How's that bullet hole doing, Cap?” Tony asks as soon as Steve slides the door shut to Tony's personal workspace.

“More of a scar now. More than manageable. What did you find?”

“Great, we have a few locations we can hit. Hydra offshoots, nobodies in the grand scheme but enough of somebody that maybe we can find something. Original paper files, old tech, that sorta thing. No one major will notice if these places go offline though.”

Steve nods. “Do we need to call in anyone else or are we good to go?” he asks, his voice teetering on the edge of Full Captain now.

“We're good, Cap. Just say the word.”

 

They've hit three Hydra bases in less than two days before they decide to take a moment to breathe. There weren't many people in any of the bases, and most of the people who were there were paper pushers, making sure nothing happened to their hard-copy, unredacted files. Oops. No one got especially belligerent, which made Steve's job easier:  _ round them up and call Maria _ has always been a lot cleaner than  _ kill them then cover up so the public doesn't know. _

Even so, after that third base, Steve and Tony need a break. They had found a chair there, the arm restraints ripped out and dried blood splattered on the floor and walls. Its headpiece is crushed in the center, some sort of dried bile on it. Steve cringes to think about it. He doesn't want to know what happened.

Once they've finished digging through filing cabinets and desk drawers to make sure they've found everything, Steve dumps himself onto the ground a bit of the way outside the base, just on the edge of the forest. He's already mentally exhausted. Tony, awkward in his Iron Man suit, leans on a tree and slides down next to him.

“Rough day, grandpop?”

“I'm younger than you, Tony.”

“Nope! You're old. What, your old bones can't take all this running around and punching stuff? Are you tired because you haven't been eating enough? Those old teeth can't chew real food and I forgot to bring a blender, that why you're so cranky?”

Steve is blessedly saved by his phone ringing.

“Rogers,” he answers.

“Hey, thanks for raiding Luxembourg without me. Wasn't looking forward to that one.”

“Natasha,” Steve breathes out. He hadn't heard from her since DC.

“How's Stark?” she asks. “I see he tagged along.”

“Good, Natasha, everything is good… How are you?”

“Busy,” she says. “Mind if I join you on your next trip?”

 

Natasha joining them is scarily helpful. She knows far more than Steve would ever want her to about Hydra’s inner workings.

“It’s what happens when they stuff your brain with kill codes,” she says. “You figure out exactly what they want.”

He stops asking questions after that.

She gets them into places far more easily than they would have on their own, and she knows the layout and where to find inactive files in most bases they hit in eastern Europe. She knows how to sneak into mostly-empty Hydra bases without anyone noticing, which saves them the trouble of fighting their way through more than often than not.

It also gets them into a lot of trouble.

Natasha has told them about a long-abandoned weapons storage facility in Bucharest, so long officially unused that it predates her, that agents sent out use to restock or as a safehouse. “Everyone knew about it,” she says, “so we can empty it out and give them a disadvantage.” Steve and Tony agree that hitting it, even if no one is there, could do a lot of good.

They aren’t expecting a firefight, but they end up in one anyway.

Tony, being armored, heads in from their repulsor-made tunnel system first. Even though JARVIS had read no life signs, he’s down before Steve can even get through.

Steve spends all of half of a second being useless, and by that time Natasha is already wrapping herself around the person who took Stark down. He tosses his shield at the first Hydra agent he sees, then tosses 240 pounds of himself at the next one. It may not be his most graceful fight, but it’s effective.

Tony is back up when Steve gets his shield back, shooting down new hostiles as they run in. A red light is flashing in the room and down the hall, but no alarms are sounding. Steve rushes the doorway, beating down agents making their way through before beating the hinges off the reinforced door with his shield. The whole room vibrates with the impact as Steve replaces the door in its frame. Tony seems to understand what Steve is trying to do and lands in front of the frame, focuses energy towards his chest repulsor, and fires towards the door, knocking back the first half dozen agents behind it.

Steve is about to barrel his way through the next agents when the ceiling caves in above him.

 

Steve wakes up for a moment with a terrible headache, one side of his body feeling like fire while he can barely feel the other. He passes out again before he can think of anything else.

 

He wakes up again in a hospital bed, alone except for the beeping of a heart monitor. He tries to speak but can’t. A moment later, a doctor he recognizes from the tower is in his room.

She helps him hold a cup of water to his lips and drink before asking, “would you like me to send in Mr. Stark now, Captain? JARVIS will have already alerted him that you’re awake.” Steve tries to nod but doesn’t think he’s successful. He doesn’t know because he falls back asleep anyway.

 

After a few days of not staying awake, Steve is finally conscious long enough for Natasha to tell him what happened.

“JARVIS wasn’t reading them as human for some reason,” she says to Steve’s almighty frown. “Their vital signs were reading like rodents or something. Stark is trying to figure that out now, but he thinks it’s some kind of signal disruption tech they’re trying to make.” Steve hums for her to continue. “Also…” She pauses for a second and bites her lip, showing nerves Steve wouldn’t have seen otherwise. He appreciates her not hiding from him. “The place was rigged to blow before we even got in.”

“What?”

“Unless Hydra is trying to kill their own forces, which still isn’t off the table, someone else got there before us, Steve.”

Steve groans and closes his eyes as he leans his head against the pillow again. He’s too high for this.

 

When he’s well enough to go back to his own floor, he calls Sam.

“Why does it take a building falling on you to call me, dude?” Sam says before Steve can greet him.

“Why do you and Natasha have to talk about me behind my back?” Steve shoots back.

“So I don’t have to find out that Captain America is dead from my local news channel, Steve.” Steve winces. He hears Sam sigh into the line. “How are you, though? Besides, you know. The building thing. How’s your world tour of Hydra highlights?”

“Shitty,” Steve admits. “We aren’t finding much, which I expected, but the more we do the worst it gets. How can so many people agree with literal  _ Nazis _ , Sam?  _ Nazis _ !”

“You’d be surprised, man.”

Sam turns the conversation onto less shitty things as subtly as he can, asking Steve why he’s so stupid (“I’m only  _ kind of _ an idiot, we all thought the place was empty, give me some credit”) and turning stupidity into jokes about Steve’s bad taste (“Seriously, Steve, what is with you and Baby Mario? You don’t have to play as him every time!”), ending up with them arguing about movie preferences (“You can’t say Dreamworks is better than Disney  when you haven’t even seen  _ Lilo & Stitch _ , yes I know I made you watch  _ How to Train Your Dragon _ , you know what pull up  _ Lilo & Stitch _ we’re gonna watch it together right now”).

The movie has been on just long enough for Steve to be invested when JARVIS tells him that Tony would like to see him in the lab.

“You aren’t getting out of this one, Steve!” Sam yells into the phone after they’ve said their goodbyes and are hanging up. Steve rolls his eyes and looks to the ceiling as if JARVIS can see him and would agree with him.

 

When he gets down to the lab, he’s surprised to see both Maria and Natasha there. JARVIS hadn’t told him they would be here.

“Sit down, Cap, you look pathetic leaning like that,” Tony says.   
Steve gives him his  _ angry chin of America _ face before Maria cuts in.

“Steve,” she says, “you may actually wanna sit down. We’ve got a lot to go over, and you’re not going to like it all.”

Steve frowns slightly, more confused than annoyed, but he sits on the nearest stool, next to where Tony is sitting on a table,  anyway. He knows Maria wouldn’t baby him.

Maria and Natasha exchange a look, then Natasha nods sideways. Maria stands a little stiffer and turns to Steve.

“There isn’t a fun way to say this. Hell, there isn’t even a way to say this that makes it sound believable. We aren’t sure about this, Steve, but we think Barnes may have escaped, not died.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooo this chapter wasn't supposed to end here but I got lazy and decided why not leave it on an unnecessary cliffhanger-type thing instead of actually finishing it? I'm great at this writing thing.  
> You all have no idea how much I love it when I see the little subscriptions number on this fic increase. Thank you so much!!!  
> Also, I've remade my tumblr @MrsCalculation, so you can follow me if you want!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone's wondering why Natasha was totally fine last chapter but Steve ended up in the hospital, it's because Stark covered her then carried her out when everything died down before he went back in for Steve. I would have included it if I could have found a way to fit it in decently, but it wasn't working so I gave up.

Steve’s head is buried in the couch cushions at Clint’s place. They smell funny. He’s glad for the distraction.

Bucky had _lived._  They didn’t know how, but his team had been convinced that Bucky had not only _lived_ , but _escaped_.

“There are several reports claiming a man with a metal arm pulled them out from rubble,” Maria had said. “He focused mostly on children and families. No one matching the description was found on site when authorities arrived.”

“A handful of Hydra operatives have reported seeing him in their bases, but by the time they sounded the alarms, he was gone,” Natasha said. “Operatives who reported sighting him have been decommissioned, as the only evidence higher-ups could find of breach was missing cash. It’s assumed they were covering up their theft.”

“After about three years, sightings stopped. Whether that’s because he’s gone or because he just stopped hitting Hydra bases, we don’t know. Maybe the operatives were stealing from Hydra and just stopped reporting him, even. But there have been no reports of a body matching his description, so we can’t safely assume he’s dead.”

“Steve.” Natasha had approached him slowly and put her hand on his shoulder. “Steve, we’ll find him.”

Steve had stood up far too quickly after sitting frozen for so long. Pain ripped through his sides, and everyone had looked terrified for a moment.

He had looked to Tony, trying to ground himself, to wait for the punchline, to be told that he was okay. Tony had just looked incredibly pissed.

Steve had turned and stalked out of the lab, taking the stairs back to his apartment. He was there less than two minutes before he decided he needed to get out, to forget what had just happened, to spend five minutes of his life being _normal_.

He called Clint on his way down to the garage.

An hour later and here Steve is, face smushed against weird-smelling cushions, pretending he doesn’t notice Clint putting things all over his back.

When Clint apparently runs out of trinkets to balance on Steve, he slumps against the arm of the couch and asks, “Wanna talk about it?”

“No,” Steve whines into the cushions. He shouldn’t have said anything. The cushions taste funny, too.

“Cool. Wanna play Mario Party?”

“Hnnnnnnnnnnnn.”

Clint, good friend that he is, understands and sets up the game. Steve is grateful. Clint knows almost nothing about what’s going on but is always willing to humor Steve and his bullshit anyway.

He and Sam would probably get along.

 

As it turns out, Mario Party is a great way to forget what you’re angry about. It’s hard to be angry at the universe when you’re too busy being angry at pixels and random-chance games.

When Clint tosses the controller and watches it bounce once on the couch, he and Steve decide it’s time for a breather.

“Hey, Steve. You didn’t do your homework.”

Steve looks down at Clint where he’s dangling upside down again, head on the floor and thighs on Steve’s knee. “What?”

“You didn’t match with me on Tinder. I found you. Or am I not hot enough for you?”

Oh. “I haven’t even used it. I looked at my profile once. You’re a jerk, by the way.”

“Come on come on come on come on come-”

“Fine!”

Steve opens the app and starts reading the first profile that shows up. _Eriel, 27._ She has no description, so he presses the _X_ . _Seamus, 32_ , shows up. “Ex-military. Trying to figure myself out after military life. I like cooking, reading, and fixing things. Polyglot, so I bet I can out-swear you.” Steve presses the heart. _It’s a match!_ his screen reads.

“Dude,” Clint says, “you’re never going to find me if you go through every profile individually.”

Steve looks at him, unimpressed, and continues reading. _Riley, 30_. “Who wants to go camping with me? I need a break from the city. I’ll even bring my dog.” Steve makes a show of swiping through their pictures and examining each one closely. Clint groans.

“Steeeeve,” he whines.

Steve realizes he can’t tell Riley’s gender, not that he would care. They have a cute dog and their pictures make them seem nice enough. He presses the heart.

“Give me that!” Clint jumps on Steve and grabs his phone. “You don’t even do it right, you’ve gotta swipe, you can’t just press the buttons!”

Steve snorts but doesn’t fight for his phone back. He doesn’t feel like hurting himself more just to be an asshole. He’s too drained for that. He gets up and goes to the kitchen for a drink.

“Aha!” he hears from Clint as he’s waiting for the last of the coffee to drip. “Found me!”

Steve wonders if Clint is always this endearingly annoying or if it’s a show he puts on when Steve comes over. He likes it either way.

 

Steve stays with Clint that night. He hadn't intended to when he first came over, but he's upset and exhausted and he rode his bike here. He would rather not drive, especially not back to the tower.

He wonders if he should go back to DC. This was never supposed to be a long-term thing, and he had formed a whole life during his few years there that he's sad to have left behind. But now that he knows Bucky may still be alive, well… He doesn't want to give up the only opportunity he may have to find him.

(He doesn't want to be found or he would have contacted you, he's dead, that wasn't even him how could it be him you _saw_ him die you've been dead this whole time too he's dead he’s been dead he's)

Steve sits up from the pull-out bed abruptly, thankful that the resulting pain slicing through him at least reminds him he's alive. He can't sit alone in his thoughts right now. He can't think about the world and what has happened to it over the decades he didn't live.

He thinks about calling Sam, but it's late. He can hear Clint snoring from the loft. It would be rude to text or call Natasha after storming out on her without a word earlier.

He opens Tinder.

(He needs more friends.)

He's got dozens of matches he definitely didn't make, some of whom have already messaged him. Thanks, Clint. He scrolls to the bottom of his match list. The only person he recognizes is Seamus.

He considers it for a second, then decides it can't do any harm.

**Steve: Hi! What languages do you speak?**

Surprisingly enough, the response is almost instant. That's good. Saves him from having to go through other matches for now.

**Seamus: hey, Steve. English obviously. Russian Spanish Portuguese German and Irish.**

**Seamus: you speak any?**

The second message seems like an afterthought, like he had realized he hadn't left any room for conversation there, even though he had. That's a lot of languages.

**Steve: Well, obviously English, too. Some Irish because I have Irish family, and enough French and German that I look like I know them when I really don't.**

Steve really hopes he's not about to be language tested. So of course,

**Seamus: An labhraíonn tú Gaeilge?**

Great.

**Steve: Níl labhraím go heasca. Tá do Gaeilge níos fearr.**

Steve waits for a second before sending another message.

**Steve: I’m going to be honest with you, I suck at writing it. I speak it better.**

**Seamus: trying to meet me already? You move fast, Steve.**

**Seamus: that was good, though.**

**Seamus: it’s a bitch to spell**

Steve can't help himself. He laughs a little. He kind of likes Seamus already.

**Steve: thanks. Where are you from?**

He's absolutely not trying to get to know a random stranger. He's just polite.

**Seamus: um, everywhere? Been here a couple years though. Why did you leave Brooklyn for dc?**

Shit. Well, he's not lying if he's not specific, right?

**Steve: I work for the government, government works from DC.**

**Steve: Also, I’m not technically in brooklyn for work. I’m in Manhattan. I have a friend here, though, and I stay with him sometimes.**

Steve is giving himself an out, he knows that. He just wanted a distraction for tonight, not to have to commit to hanging out with someone. He _can’t_ , for obvious reasons.

**Seamus: when are you going back?**

**Seamus: to dc, I mean**

Come on, Seamus. Why do you have to bring up that internal crisis?

**Steve: I’m not sure yet. Some new stuff has come up at work that makes things more difficult.**

**Seamus: Can you tell me what you do? or you’d have to kill me**

Steve is startled for a second, then snorts.

**Steve: I mean, where’s the mystery if I tell you everything?**

**Steve: but no, I can’t be too specific. I’m sorry.**

**Seamus: it’s cool**

Steve doesn’t know how to respond to that, and it doesn’t seem like Seamus is going to respond either, so he gets to swiping until he falls asleep.

 

Steve wakes up when he rolls over onto a lego. He’s tempted to go stick the thing in Clint’s bed as payback, but he was nice enough to let Steve stay the night, so he doesn’t.

He checks his phone to see what time it is (early) and is surprised to see a new message from Seamus. He’s less surprised to see one from Natasha.

**Seamus: i made muffins**

**NR: Stark wants you back here to discuss our next move. I want you back here so we can check on those injuries. Let us know when you’re coming back.**

Huh. Seamus’s message is more fun to deal with.

**Steve: what type of muffins?**

While he waits for a response, he goes over what he should send to Natasha. Does he even want there to be a next move? Burn Hydra down, of course, but what about Bucky? Is it worth it to look for him? Steve wouldn’t be so terrible if he continued his life like Bucky is dead. There’s no way that was actually Bucky. It was a look-alike, a clone, a person who escaped and is living their own life who doesn’t need that life upended by Steve’s desperation for Bucky to be alive.

**Seamus: blueberry lemon. somehow I burnt half the tin but not the other half.**

Steve is startled out of his spiral by the message, and he laughs aloud at the sheer ridiculousness of it.

**Steve: how the fuck did you do that? I thought you liked cooking?**

**Seamus: liking it doesn’t mean I’m good at it.**

He laughs aloud again and decides to text Natasha back while he still has his good mood.

**SR: I’ll be back this afternoon, since you asked so nicely. I don’t know our next move. Be prepared to take point on this.**

 

True to his word, Steve is back at the tower a bit after noon. He’d waited for Clint to wake up, baiting him with coffee and bacon, before leaving. They’d had a great time making fun of each other over breakfast, Steve complaining about rolling over onto a lego while Clint accused him of trying to destroy one of his three precious legos.

“Three? Clint, what can you building with three legos?”

“Well I couldn’t build _anything_ with just the one you rolled on, could I?”

He’d been sad to leave because Clint made things feel really _normal_ , but he’d have to face reality sooner than later.

Which is why Natasha is now poking at his formerly-broken ribs as if they weren’t already bruised enough.

“Okay,” she eventually says, “you didn’t fuck yourself up more with your temper tantrum. Good job, Steve, I’m proud of you.”

He would stare her down, but her scowl is more impressive than his.

They walk to Tony’s lab together, where Tony is waiting, this time without Maria.

Steve knows he’s fucked when Tony doesn’t quip at him when he walks in.

“What the hell, Rogers.”

“What?” Steve asks. “What did I do wrong here? Next time you watch your best friend die right in front of you then find out years later that he didn’t die but may have been tortured and forced to kill innocent people and died on a mission to kill people, _then_ find out that he didn’t die but went AWOL, next time! Next time you tell me I’m not allowed to have a bad day after that.”

Tony doesn’t shrink and his anger doesn’t dissipate, but his features do go softer. “Yeah, well,” he almost whispers, “next time you find out that the person who killed your parents could have just as easily walked away, you tell me how to feel.”

Steve stares for a second before he leaves the lab.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My Irish is pretty rusty, and I know this isn't the dialect Steve would have learned from his mother, but it's the dialect I know. "An labhraíonn tú Gaeilge?" is "Do you speak Irish?" and "Níl labhraím go heasca. Tá do Gaeilge níos fearr" is "not very easily. Yours is much better."
> 
> This was again an unedited chapter, so feel free to let me know about errors! Thanks for reading!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops another unedited chapter. Hope it's still okay!  
> I've been with family today so I couldn't write much, so no promises on a chapter tomorrow. I don't want to force something out that isn't any good because I kind of feel like that's what's happening here and y'all deserve more than that. <3  
> Thanks for sticking with me! If you want this story from a different POV or if you want a sequel, please please please let me know in the comments or on tumblr!

Steve doesn’t bother to get his stuff from his apartment. He has his phone, his wallet, and his bike. There’s nothing money can’t buy him on his way back to DC.

He’s halfway through New Jersey before he stops for fuel. He pulls out his phone and ignores the messages and calls from Natasha in favor of one from Seamus.

**Seamus: you want a burnt muffin?**

Steve really likes this guy. His type of self-deprecating humor is familiar to Steve, and he’s made him laugh while upset twice already.

**Steve: as much as I do, I’m actually on my way back to DC for now. It came up suddenly.**

**Steve: I’ll let you know when I’m back if you’d like, though.**

Even though he’d initially not intended to keep up this conversation, Steve thinks he owes Seamus at least that.

**Seamus: yeah sure. can we talk in the meantime or are you too busy saving the world or some shit for that**

Clint really had done a good job making sure his face wasn’t obvious in the pictures, at least, seeing as Seamus’s comment had come across as a joke instead of an accusation.

**Steve: yeah, I’d like that. I’m about to be on the road again, though. I’ll message you when I’m there?**

**Seamus: okay talk to you later**

Steve smiles at his phone for a second then decides to go through Seamus’s pictures. He hadn’t done it before matching with him because his description had been enough. He likes what he sees.

Seamus’s first picture, the only one Steve has really seen, is a close-up of his bearded face. Other than the beard and the barely-visible downward curl of his lips, that’s all of him that’s visible. The rest of his face is covered by something fluffy, presumably a pet. His next picture is a shot from behind of long, dark hair. It reaches his (incredibly well-defined) shoulders, but that’s all Steve gets out of that picture. How long had he been out of the military? That’s a lot of hair; he has to have been out for a while. The third is him from the side, a hat on and his hair pulled into a ponytail. The same fluffy thing, definitely a cat, is standing on his shoulders, its puffy tail in his face. Seamus looks like he’s laughing.

Steve notices that, much like his own profile, he can’t make out Seamus’s face. Seamus also has fewer pictures than Steve does, and none of them with other people, but the last one clearly wasn’t taken on his own. Maybe his military history kept him from showing his face, or maybe he just hates pictures of himself. Steve doesn’t know, and as much as he wants to know what he looks like when he smiles, he doesn’t mind.

He puts his phone away, fuels up, and buys a water bottle from the gas station before taking off. He’s glad to have something to think about that isn’t life-shattering for part of his drive.

 

Halfway through Maryland, Steve stops to call Sam.

“Hey, man, I’ve only got a minute before I have to get in for a session. You okay?”

Shit. It’s not that he had forgotten that Sam had a regular work life, unlike his own. It just didn’t occur to him before he called.

“Yeah, I’m okay. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”

“What? That doesn’t sound very okay,” Sam says. “I can meet you at your place tonight if you need me to.”

“No, it’s fine, Sam, I just wanted to let you know I’d be back.”  _ I didn’t want to upend your life again, not without warning you at least. _

“Look, Steve, I gotta go, but I’ll call you tonight, okay? Be safe.”

“Thanks, Sam.” He hangs up.

The rest of the ride is uneventful with its usual DC traffic, leaving Steve running out of distractions with plenty of time to think.

Tony is out. He’s mad, and maybe he has right to be upset, but Steve doesn’t have to work with him through that. He doesn’t want to find Bucky,  _ his  _ Bucky, alive and okay and surviving only for Tony to ruin it all again.

Sam is out. Steve isn’t dragging him around the world to look for Bucky. He never signed up for that sort of danger, and even if he had, this is Steve’s problem, not Sam’s.

Steve’s not sure about Natasha. He trusts her, but he knows she wouldn’t trust an ex-Hydra assassin. She had seemed genuinely scared of him when she told Steve about him in the hospital that day. Whether this person is Bucky or not, Natasha would never trust him.

Maria is out. She technically works for Stark now. He’s not going to force her to make that choice.

It’s either Clint or no one, Steve decides. He’ll see what he can do on his own before calling Clint in to deal with a fellow brainwashed assassin.

 

Steve arrives back to his apartment surprised to see how little has changed. He’d swept the perimeter, he’s not  _ stupid _ , but had found little changed in the area, except that Kate’s welcome mat is now gone.

_Sharon._ _Sharon’s_ welcome mat.

He doesn’t even have the energy to be frustrated about that anymore. It feels like a different lifetime.

Steve is sitting in his living room looking at the holes he had just duct-taped over when his phone chimes. He should have known Sam would be checking in on him already.

It’s not Sam.

**Seamus: hey you make it back yet or did you die**

His sense of humor is really direct and dry. Steve doesn’t know what to make of that.

**Steve: just got back to my place about an hour ago, actually. Unfortunately for you still very much alive.**

Steve pulls up a message to Sam before he can think too much about his state of mortality. Is he dead? If not, can he even die? He should have been dead several times over so there’s no way he’s alive but if he is

Sam.

**SR: Hey, I’m back in my own apartment. I don’t know how long I’m going to be here but I think I need a new place.**

Steve feels like a real adult now that he’s pulled himself out of his own head once.

**Seamus: that’s not unfortunate for me**

Steve smiles a little. Seamus is kind of awkward with his weird texting style, but Steve thinks he’s a good guy.

**Steve: oh, well. Thanks?**

**Steve: :)**

He adds the smile to feel like less of an asshole.

**SW: should I go over? Do you want me to call? or do you just not feel up to it right now?**

Seamus is sweet for a stranger, and Sam is really the best friend Steve could have ever imagined.

**SR: I don’t feel up to it, no. Thank you though. Want to get together tomorrow?**

He only asks because he doesn’t want Sam to think he’s dead or something. Really, as great as Sam is, he would cut him out completely if it meant he would be safe. He doesn’t want to do that, but he would.

**SW: if you think that will help, definitely. It’d be nice to lay my eyes on you to see you’re still in one piece.**

Yeah, Sam is more than Steve ever could have asked for.

 

The place is a lot cleaner. Steve knows he’s going to need to fix those bullet holes eventually instead of letting some penguin duct tape cover them forever, but otherwise it doesn’t look like someone had almost died in his apartment. He’s satisfied.

His place doesn’t really look like someone lives in it, though.

Steve considers leaving to get out of this stuffy little hole he’d shoved himself into for two years and change. He’d liked it before the world collapsed around him yet again, but now it feels like such a fake part of him, like a bandage he put over a stab wound. It hasn’t hurt him, but he’s not sure it ever helped.

It isn’t that late. He’s been here a couple hours already, but he’s definitely still got a few hours of open restaurants and clubs. He can go out if he wants.

He decides to walk to a gas station for snacks, then head back. It’s a compromise: get some air and stretch his legs, but stay in enough to make home feel like home.

Seamus messages him on his way out the door.

**Seamus: are you happy, Steve?**

Steve frowns. Was that an accusation or a legitimate question?

**Steve: What do you mean?**

He pockets his phone and pulls on the hood of his sweatshirt. It’s starting to get cool at night now.

Steve walks a while, taking a really indirect path to anywhere and scanning the area consistently for a tail. He hasn’t noticed anyone following him, but he still waits until he’s in a gas station and has done a solid once-over before checking his messages again.

**Seamus: Are you happy. Do you like your life? Do you like your job? and your friends and your hobbies. do you like yourself?**

Huh.

**Steve: Sometimes. Things are good now when they weren’t always before.**

It’s as honest as he can be.

**Seamus: yeah, me too. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy.**

Steve buys some junk food then steps out of the way.

**Steve: you take what you can get though.**

He leaves the store. No one follows him home.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry there was no update yesterday. If you follow me on tumblr, I'll post there if I ever deviate from whatever update schedule I have. I also posted a preview for this chapter to make up for it!

If Steve plans on staying here, he needs to buy some real food. Sunflower seeds, beef jerky, and sour candies do not make for a good dinner.

He messages Seamus a bit more, finding out a little bit about his life before he goes to bed. After what seems like a hard run in the military, he hadn’t known what to do with his life. He bounced around different places, never settling down, until he found an older woman in Bed-Stuy who needed someone to help her fix her upstairs room so she could rent it. She was getting too old to do it on her own, so he helped her, and she’s been letting him live there for cheap rent ever since.

**Seamus: she was the first person who was actually nice to me after I got out. She’s the best. even if I got a job doing more than just local home repair, I’d never want to leave. she’s probably the nicest person on earth.**

Steve had teared up a little at that.

He buys Sam lunch on his first day back, but turns down going to the VA with him to sit in on some sessions. They catch up over their sandwiches instead.

“You made a Tinder?”

“No, Clint made a Tinder for me. I just haven’t deleted it yet.”

“Hawkeye made you a Tinder. You’re fighting with Iron Man over how to handle a mythical ex-assassin. And you _blocked_ Black Widow. What is your life, man?”

Well, when he puts it that way. “I don’t have her blocked,” Steve says. “She’d find me anyway if she wanted to. What’s the point?”

Sam raises his eyebrows and then lifts his shoulders in a _fair enough_ gesture.

They spend the rest of the time catching up about Sam’s group therapy members, the ones Steve had met over the years.

“You remember Bradford, right? He’s finally decided to go to culinary school like he’s been saying. I’m gonna help him apply for aid.”

Steve’s happy for him. He had never even heard of princess cake before he met Bradford, and now he thinks he won’t be able to eat anyone else’s. It wouldn’t be the same.

They part not long after that, Sam to his group sessions and Steve to the grocery store for real food. Maybe he’ll go to a hardware store later, patch up some bullet holes.

Maybe he just won’t think about them.

He’s finishing up the last of his shopping (strawberries aren’t in season so they’re expensive, but he _really wants strawberries_ ) when his phone chimes.

**NR: Stark sent some files along to me that you may wanna check out. I’m sending them your way.**

Honestly, she’s treating him far too fairly for how he’s treated her recently. He just isn’t ready to face that yet. He tells himself he’ll respond to her later, when he isn’t grocery shopping.

 

Steve is unpacking his groceries (he’d gotten the strawberries; he deserved this, right?) in his lonely, too-clean kitchen when he makes a decision.

**Steve: Hey, so… Do you know the best way to fix small holes in walls?**

Seamus had initiated every conversation but that first one. Steve knows he can just as easily look this up online, but this way he gets social interaction along with home repair skills.

He definitely doesn’t want an excuse to talk to Seamus again.

**Seamus: steve what did you do**

**Seamus: but yeah I know how**

He gives Steve a small list of things to buy, which Steve diligently runs out to get, then gives him step-by-step instructions on how to fix the interior holes.

Steve isn’t going to tell him there are entry holes on the outside, too.

He steps back and looks at his handiwork, probably disproportionately proud of himself. He pretty much won half of World War II between just him and his team, and his new team stopped a global-scale alien invasion. He should have reached the status of “adult” long ago.

Still satisfying to see it, though.

He gets started on dinner for the night, keeping up idle conversation with Seamus and eating strawberries the whole time.

 

About a week of trying to live a normal life later, Steve notices that the distance on Seamus’s profile has gone down from triple digits to double. He hadn’t mentioned being on a road trip or anything, but then, Steve hadn’t mentioned being Captain America, so he supposes it’s fair enough. Not everything is his business.

He decides a week of being a brat is enough. He texts Natasha.

**SR: Call me when you can. Nothing important.**

She calls immediately.

“Hey, Rogers,” she says, not sounding at all upset with him. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, Natasha. I just needed time.”

“Of course. I assume you haven’t looked at those files I sent, then.”

Steve sighs. “No, I haven’t. I’m sorry. I’m the worst superhero ever.”

She laughs at him. “You’re also the _first_ superhero ever. You’ve been at this forever, Steve. Everyone needs a break sometimes.”

He decides not to mention that he’d taken a decades-long nap as a break.

“Hey,” she says into his silence. “I know you haven’t looked at them, but I’ve been following some leads in those files. Let me know if you get around to them. You may be surprised what you find.”

“Yeah, Natasha, I will.” He pauses, then decides to just go for it. “How’s Stark?”

She barely hesitates for a beat, but it’s enough. “He’s angry, Steve. He knows he shouldn’t take it out on you, he really does, but he’s angry.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, “I kind of figured that out. Do you think…” he stops before finishing.

Natasha picks up after a second, like she was giving him a chance. “No, Steve. I don’t think he’d hurt him. I don’t think he’d even find him. But be careful.”

He chuffs in understanding. “So,” he asks Natasha, “where are you now?”

“You know I’d have to kill you if I told you that, Steve,” she says, her voice far to even to be serious.

She and Seamus would probably get along.

 

“So,” Sam starts Friday night over drinks. Uh oh. “Who’ve you been texting all the time?”

Great.

“That’s classified. Superhero business, you know.”

Sam snorts. “You don’t smile like that about _superhero business_ , Steve. Who you talkin’ to?”

“You know what, Wilson?” he says, pointing at him over his glass. “I don’t think you deserve to know unless you find it out on your own.”

Sam just laughs at him. “Dude, you are as subtle as a brick through a window. I guarantee you I know your phone password by now.”

Steve accepts the challenge, locking his phone and sliding it across the table to Sam. “Go for it,” he says.

He regrets it when Sam unlocks his phone on the first try.

“Oohh, who’s Seamus?” he asks while scrolling through Steve’s phone.

“What the fu— how did you do that?” Steve asks while standing up suddenly to lean across the table and grab his phone.

Sam lifts it up and away from him. “Don’t you dare start a scene in this bar, Steven Grant Rogers, so help me god,” he says. He levels Steve with a look that could put Black Widow to shame, then makes a show of sitting on Steve’s damn phone. Gross. “Tell me about Seamus and I’ll give you it back,” he says.

“At least tell me how figured out my code first,” Steve whines at him.

“That was _easy,_ dude,” Sam says. “It’s your mom’s birthdate. You’ve always seemed like a real mama’s boy.” He holds up his hands when Steve opens his mouth to protest. “Hey, I’m not saying it like it’s a bad thing. I am too.”

Steve deflates a little but resolves to change his password after tonight. “Fine,” he says, “Seamus is… Well, he’s someone I matched with on Tinder. He lives in Brooklyn. I started talking to him one night when I couldn’t sleep, and, well…”

“Dude, you don’t have to justify anything to me, I’m just messing with you.” He gives Steve’s phone back. “You wanna get out of here?” he asks, somehow always knowing when Steve is uncomfortable.

“Sure,” he says. “Wanna head back to yours? It’s been too long.”

“Of course, dude, I’ve got nothing to do. I got this new game, too…”

“Oh, god, not another dancing game,” Steve says.

“Yep.” Sam grins ridiculously at him.

Steve is too busy enjoying Sam’s company and his beautiful smile to notice that someone follows them on the way to Sam’s.

 

He wakes up on Sam’s couch the next morning not because he got too drunk to go home, of course. No, it’s because he was kind of afraid for Sam after last night.

Sam should really learn that it’s impossible to _hold your own_ against Captain America.

After a few too many of those alcoholic root beers he likes so much, Sam had gotten really into “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in his stupid dancing game. After that, Steve had challenged him to some weird song that had gotten really popular about a year after New York that Sam had forced him to listen to a million times until it was all Steve could think about for a month.

Steve had recorded that one, so he has _video evidence_ of Sam getting far too excited for his drunken state and, of course, falling into his coffee table.

He and Steve had saved the world once.

After that, Steve had carried him into bed and given him a huge glass of water to drink. He had decided it would be best if he stayed over to make sure Sam wasn’t too dead in the morning.

So Steve is already on his second batch of pancakes by the time Sam stumbles out of his room, trying to glare at Steve but too busy covering his eyes from the light for it to be successful.

“I hate you,” he says.

Steve walks over and gives him a hug. He’s missed him.

 

After getting a couple of glasses of water and a huge stack of pancakes into Sam, Steve leaves. He’s caused enough damage for the weekend.

They had driven Sam’s car the night before, so Steve decides he’ll just walk back to his place. It’s not too far, and it’s a really nice day.

About a third of the way there, though, Steve notices he’s being followed.

He can’t be sure someone is actively following him, but he gets that sensation, and every time he turns around, he thinks he sees a shadow disappearing into nowhere. He walks back and tries to follow it once, but he can’t find a source.

Halfway to his apartment, Steve changes his route. He dips into a parking lot of a closed-down shop and texts Natasha.

**SR: Are you in DC?**

He keeps his phone in his hand and gets back to walking, taking paths with as few people as possible.

After a few direction changes, he feels like he’s lost them. He ducks into the first grocery store he finds and heads to the back anyway.

**NR: No. Why?**

Well, shit.

**SR: I’m being followed.**

**SR: Could be Hydra, could be some random stalker, but they’re good. Subtle. I doubt it’s either.**

He looks up from his phone and wanders out of the frozen foods aisle. He wants to keep moving.

**NR: I’ve got a hunch.**

**NR: If you can get to somewhere secure, you really need to check out those files I sent you.**

Steve wanders into the dry cereals aisle. May as well get something while he’s here.

**SR: If they know where my apartment is, there’s nowhere secure around here. Why can’t you just tell me what’s going on?**

He picks a box of cereal at random and moves over an aisle.

**NR: If you give me a few hours I can meet you there. I’ll give you coordinates to meet. There’s somewhere I needed to be there anyway.**

Great. He grabs a loaf of bread and some doughnuts.

**SR: You still have a safehouse around here?**

**SR: I’ll meet you there.**

He gets a case of water, too. He really should have gotten a cart if he was going to be texting this whole time.

**NR: this isn’t a safehouse.**

**NR: You aren’t going to like what you find. Be prepared.**

He goes through a checkout line, unable to respond if he doesn’t want to drop his case of water. Or his doughnuts. He buys one of those big reusable bags to make his life easier.

After he’s out, he checks the location on his phone. It’s in the heart of the city. He gets walking.

**SR: En route. What should I expect?**

**NR: No one will be there. Don’t destroy anything before I’m there.**

**SR: Sure thing.**

 

When he gets to the building, he has a hard time keeping that promise. He has to go back upstairs, risking his cover, to calm himself down.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so real talk for a second: I started this because of writer's block on another project, which I have barely touched since. This has really helped me, but now I have a deadline coming up soon (in, like, ten days...) that I am WAY behind for. So I'm going to try to finish this up in the next few days, but I may do the last few chapters every other day instead of daily like I have been.  
> That said! I'm still thinking of putting up either a sequel to this or bits of this story from another POV once this one is complete. If I meet my deadlines on my other project and am satisfied with what I've done, I'll do that.  
> Thank you for your patience and thank you for reading!!!


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry that this chapter is up late and it jumps around so much, I just had a lot going on but didn't want to leave you all update-less! I promise things will (hopefully) start to make sense soon.  
> Thank you to everyone who comments and kudos and whatnot!!! You are all so lovely and you're the reason I keep writing this weird little thing!

Steve has lost his damn mind.

He had gone where Natasha had told him to, gone to the downstairs of an old bank, where she said he would be angry, where he would be disturbed. She was right, of course. He hated what he saw, a broken-down tank and a pile of rubble that clearly used to be one of those _chairs_.

But everything was falling apart or already destroyed by the time he got there.

Steve had run back upstairs, sick, and called Natasha. She hadn’t answered, but he left her a message anyway.

“Nat, it’s already been destroyed. I didn’t do anything, but that room in the basement, that fucking _torture chamber_ , it’s falling apart. I can’t stay in there. I’m on the ground floor. Call me when you’re incoming.”

He found a corner and just _sat_ until he came back to himself.

 

His phone is dying.

After a stretch of sitting there, trying to forget how he and Bucky used to think the future would hold all these _miracles_ , his phone had buzzed. It was from Seamus. He ignored it.

Instead he finally opened some of Natasha’s files and started reading until he noticed his phone dying.

Good. He needs an excuse to put it away and pretend that none of this happened.

He stands up, finds a new corner to settle himself, and waits.

 

Natasha messages him when she’s close.

**NR: ETA ten minutes.**

He picks himself up out of his corner. He starts pacing. He sweeps the ground floor of the building, which he should have done when he first got here, to avoid getting back in a corner.

Natasha finally arrives.

“Steve,” she says when she sees him, and approaches as if to give him a hug. She stops suddenly, then nods a little.

They head downstairs. Steve steels himself.

“Here,” she says when they reach the gated doors. She has a thin file in her hand. “I found this. I don’t recognize it from any of the digitized files. You may want to take a look.”

Steve takes it and holds back while she heads into _that_ room. He doesn’t know which is worse.

“Natasha…”

“Yeah, Steve.”

“But the dates on this… We were running missions when this started. This can’t be him, Natasha.”

“I know. It is. Trust me on this.”

“ _Trust_ you? Natasha, I’ve _been_ trusting you, I’m always going to trust you, but if you have answers, _I need answers_.”

She turns to face him but doesn’t meet his eye.

“You know what this place is, Steve,” she says, softer than Steve has ever heard her speak.

“Of course I do. Why is this one any different?”

She doesn’t answer that immediately. “Do you know who Paul Joyal is?”

 

Paul Joyal was the victim of a failed assassination attempt, and, according to Natasha, the beginning of the breakdown of Bucky’s conditioning.

“There are countless records of him breaking conditioning, then being rebroken,” Natasha says, “but after that one, they couldn’t bring him back as their weapon. They tried. They failed.”

“And this is where…”

“Yeah, Steve,” she says. “This was him.”

As fucked up as it is, Steve is _proud_ of him.

“Why, though?” he asks Natasha. “Why then? Why not before? How?”

“I’m not sure,” she answers, “but I think that was his first failed mission.”

Steve blinks his confusion.

Her expression, so neutral before, falters a little. “When you’re nothing but a weapon, you aim and fire. When you miss… it makes you wonder if that’s really all you’re meant to do.”

Steve feels himself nod stiffly, not knowing the feeling and not trusting himself to say the right thing.

“I have more files,” she says, voice steadier and expression stronger. “They document how hard he was to control after that. He fought back every time, destroyed chairs and killed techs if he had the chance. They would freeze him until the last possible moment, put him in the chair, give him his orders, and extract as soon as possible to avoid any breakdown.”

Steve breathes out painfully. “And it didn’t work.”

She shakes her head. “No.”

 

After she reassures him that she has his back, they go back to Steve’s apartment.

“We need to get back to Stark,” she says.

Steve doesn’t answer. He knows she’s right.

“I know you don’t trust him right now, Steve, but we may want his support on this.”

He stays quiet.

“Fine, Steve. I’m going back there, though.”

“I’ll go,” he finally says. “Just… give me a couple days to read through all of this on my own. But I’ll go.”

She pats his shoulder affectionately. “Can I stay with you those few days, then? Keep anyone off your back. I haven’t seen Sam in a while.”

He nods. Sam will be happy to see her.

 

**Seamus: hey man what’s up**

**Steve: Hey, sorry, I’ve been busy today.**

It isn’t a lie.

**Seamus: oh yeah cool**

**Seamus: I just wanted to tell you i passed through Maryland real close to dc today**

Steve checks out his location. He feels creepy when he does it, but Seamus had told him approximately where he was, so it isn’t that bad. That’s how he justifies it to himself, anyway.

**Steve: oh, really? Sorry I missed your message, maybe we could have met up**

Steve’s lying, of course, because he wouldn’t have wanted to drag Seamus into his Captain America life, but he does wish they could meet.

**Seamus: no, it’s okay, I was busy anyway**

**Steve: so not just a fun road trip?**

**Seamus: no, more of a work thing, I guess? I can’t really talk about it.**

Steve doesn’t know what Seamus does besides home repair. He assumes it’s something military.

**Steve: well, I’m going to be back in Manhattan soon. Maybe we can meet up then if it works out?**

**Seamus: maybe**

Steve feels like that’s a no. He doesn’t want to be disappointed by that, but part of him is.

 

“I can’t believe you’re leaving me already, man,” Sam says.

“I’ll be back. Or you can always come with me.

Sam laughs at him. “You know I love you, but I’ve got people here who need me. If you ever need an extra flying dude, let me know and I’ll be there. But I need to be here first.”

“Yeah, I know,” Steve says. He pokes Sam’s shoulder. “Some of us have to save the world one person at a time.”

Sam grins at him as Natasha cuts in. “You’re very cute, boys, but I have to get moving. You with me or not, Steve?”

Steve knows she’s trying to cover up that she really wants to stay with Sam, too. Sam was _home_ for both of them for a while there.

From the look on his face, Sam knows it, too. “Yeah, whatever, Red, go be bad and scary somewhere else.” He dares to give her a noogie.

It shows just how great Sam is that she doesn’t even bat his hand away.

They pile together into a group hug because together they had saved the world once and if anyone has anything to say about it, none of them care.

“Wow,” Natasha says when they let go of each other, “I feel like I just lived out every straight woman’s dream.”

Sam laughs so hard Steve’s afraid he’ll choke, while Steve feels his face turn a hideous shade of red.

 

“Just _go_ ,” Natasha says as she pushes Steve towards the doors of the tower.

He’s going to, of course, but being pushed into it by a terrifying assassin can’t really hurt his chances either.

“Steve,” she says, “you’re the one who stormed off on him. Yeah, he was an ass, but he’s _always_ an ass. Apologize to him first.”

“You think I’m worried about me here? If that’s really Bucky…”

“Jesus Christ, just _go_ , not all of us can sit around for seventy years without aging.”

He shoots her what he thinks is a solid glare, which ends up earning him a _really hard shove_. Impressive.

He walks towards the door and holds it open, waiting for her to pass through first. She glares at him but goes through anyway, just barely clearing the doorway before planting herself and waiting for Steve to enter. He sighs internally and walks in anyway, then heads with her towards the private elevators.

“Take us to wherever Tony is, please, JARVIS,” she says as the doors close.

“Gladly, Agent Romanov,” JARVIS responds, sounding genuinely happy to do so.

They arrive at Dr. Banner’s floor. Steve raises his eyebrows at Natasha as he gestures for her to step out first. She just shrugs and walks out toward the personal lab side of the hall instead of the apartment side.

“Knock knock,” she says lightly as she sticks her head through the open door.

“Don’t come in, things are radioactive and the air is lava.”

“Hi, Natasha, come in. It’s fine in here, ignore Tony,” Dr. Banner says.

“I always do,” she practically chirps as she walks in. She kisses him on the cheek. “How are you? Glad to see you rejoined us.”

“Yeah, well,” he says while absentmindedly twirling a pen, “someone here can be very persuasive.”

Before Tony can cut in, Natasha says, “I brought someone back, too.”

Steve hasn’t been _hiding,_ really, but he has stayed just out of sight outside the door. He steps in then, doing his best not to look sheepish, but not to go full Captain either.

“Dr. Banner.” He nods. “Nice to see you again.”

“You too, Steve,” Dr. Banner says with a small but genuine smile.

Steve looks over to Tony, who looks unamused but not angry.

“Did I not just say things are radioactive?” he asks Steve. It falls a bit flat.

“Stark, we all know you don’t let radioactive material on residential floors,” Natasha says.

“Blame Pepper for that one,” he says. “Rogers. What are you doing here?”

“I came to apologize, Tony.”

Which clearly cuts Tony off from saying anything else. Small miracles.

“Tony,” Steve says cautiously, just waiting to be interrupted. “We can’t be sure who this guy is. Especially with the information Natasha has given me. But whoever he is. Whoever he is, Tony, we should find him and we should _help_ him.” Steve turns to gesture to Dr. Banner. “You two are probably the only people on earth on our side who can figure out that arm, maybe figure out the technology they used to store and… and program him. You can do a lot of good with that.”

“Yeah, and what if he doesn’t let us?” Tony asks. “What if he tries to kill us, or if he’s already dead, or, I don’t know, if he’s been caught and reprogrammed to target us? We don’t know enough, Rogers, and I’m not on board with that.”

Steve turns to glance at Dr. Banner, who waves awkwardly. “Hi, uh. I don’t know much of what’s going on. So I’m just going. To leave.” He half-skitters out the door. Steve doesn’t blame him.

“Tony,” Steve says again, voice surprisingly strong. “If we find him and he’s actively belligerent, we can take him down. But we have to give him a chance. And this is all assuming we find him, which you haven’t done yet, right?”

Tony rolls his eyes and crosses his arms, but it’s JARVIS who answers. “Unfortunately, sir, I have not yet been able to locate him, as there have been no reports of attackers matching his description in several years.”

Steve raises his eyebrows and tilts his head towards Tony.

“Also, sir, I have found no reports of a body matching his description, indicating that he may be alive. If so, he has actively chosen a path of nonviolence.”

Ha. JARVIS is on Steve’s side.

“Fine,” Tony says, “but you’re the one doing the finding. I have other things to worry about.”

Steve doesn’t say anything, and he can actually _see_ Natasha holding in a snide remark, but he considers it a win overall.

 

Turns out other things to worry about include an attack on the tower.

Figures.

Steve knows Tony has a lot of enemies, so he doesn’t even bother asking questions about why when it starts. He just _does_.

He had left his shield here when he left for DC, so he’s glad he has that, but he doesn’t exactly have the best of uniforms for fighting what look like a ton of Iron Man knock offs on autopilot.

When JARVIS alerts the building that there’s an incoming attack, Steve and Natasha are in Steve’s personalized gym training in How to Be a Better Supersoldier 101 and How to Beat Said Better Supersoldier, respectively.

“Roof,” Steve says, and then they’re off, Natasha to her floor first for more weaponry, Steve straight to the roof to see what needs to be done. As he gets there a suit is already landing in front of him while more clearly make their way to ground level. That one goes down easy.

Natasha arrives just as more are landing and immediately takes one down in a mess of jumping and spinning, grasping her thighs around it until she breaks the neckpiece.

Steve thinks she really wasn’t trying her hardest in the gym.

“Rogers,” she calls, and tosses him an earpiece. He has nothing to talk into, but at least he can hear what’s going on. So far all he knows is that he and Natasha are up top. He has no idea where Tony is.

“Romanov, who else?” he shouts as he decapitates another knock-off and finds its power source. They definitely aren’t powered like Tony’s, but it also doesn’t seem like otherworldly power. Steve thinks it’s just someone trying to prove they’re as good as Stark tech. And failing. Again.

“Stark, Rhodes is incoming with Barton, Banner is sitting this one out.”

Air support and a sniper. Perfect.

“Have Rhodes put Barton on a building. You and Stark stay up here, I’ll stay on the ground. When Rhodes gets here, send him down to me.”

“How are you getting down?”

Steve wishes he had the time to level her with an unimpressed stare, but his ride’s here. He runs and jumps onto one of the knock-offs flying closest to to the building, clearly not headed for the roof, and lets it struggle to carry him to ground level while he simultaneously tries to deactivate it.

When he’s been on the ground for a while, not struggling to take individual knock-offs down but wondering where they’re all coming from and _why_ , one goes down right in front of him without him doing anything. He looks around, but Rhodes isn’t there.

He continues to fight his way through them, blocking them from the tower’s main entrance to protect those inside, when he hears through the comms, “Is Barton here?”

Steve’s wondering the same thing as he notices another one he didn’t touch go down.

“No,” Stark says in his ear, “Rhodey’s on his way now.”

Huh. He sees one fall straight out of the air. An impressive shot, even if it’s on an arbitrary knock-off.

“Then who’s—does Rogers have a gun? Where is he?”

He grunts as he takes another down. Of course he doesn’t have a gun, when has he ever had a gun?

“Rhodes!”

Steve is relieved to finally have some help on the ground.

“Captain,” Rhodes says through his suit.

“Find a source, see if we can push them back and contain them to it. If not we fight until they stop coming.”

“Got it,” Rhodes says, and takes off down the streets, blasting down knock-offs as he goes.

Steve gets back to it. It’s just one of those days.

 

Overall, things could have gone worse. No one on the team sustains any significant injuries, no civilians are harmed, and there’s even minimal structural damage to the streets and the tower.

But Tony is pissed about “low-quality pieces of shit they probably actually tried to make out of iron what idiots,” and everyone else is concerned about their unplanned backup.

At least everyone else had seen it happen, too. But still.

Steve is losing his damn mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Paul Joyal is a real person, so if you want to look that up, go for it.  
> I'm now 99% sure I'm doing another work from another point of view as a companion piece to this one. I just feel like there's too much on the other side that I can't as easily explain in here without it becoming forced.  
> Thank you so much for your patience and for reading! Like I said, I know this chapter was a mess, but it's because I'm tying everything together again soon! Thank you all! <3


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhh I'm so sorry this is up so late!!! And that it's so short!!! I've been busy and not able to access a computer much!!! Sorry if formatting is awful, I'm doing this from my phone. I'll fix it later if need be!

**Seamus: hey**

**Seamus: were you in Manhattan this morning?**

**Seamus: Steve?**

**Seamus: stevphen (i don't know how you spell your name)**

**Seamus: ??? Are you okay??**

**Seamus: okay, please let me know if you see this if you're okay**

 

Steve is on one of the lower floors, a business floor open to the public to see what Stark Industries is working on, trying to remember that science has done great, life-saving things for the world, too.

He doesn’t count himself among those things. They had saved his life for him to become a weapon.

He’s trying to distract himself, since Rhodes and Tony are still upstairs discussing what to do and who to go to about the morning attack. Steve had been hoping to spend some time with his team after their post-battle meeting since this many of them haven’t actually been in one place since before the fall of SHIELD. But Rhodes, being the one responsible adult and non-assassin on the response team, had decided, since he needed to report back to the Air Force anyway, to find out as much as Tony knew about the attackers. Which, as it turns out, isn’t much, leading to Tony and Rhodes narrowing down, researching, and video calling Rhodes’s superiors while the rest of the team wanders the tower, awaiting orders.

It sucks.

Steve doesn’t want to be upstairs, alone in his apartment. The common room doubles as their official meeting space, so that’s where Rhodes and Tony are. He can’t really leave yet, seeing as they could call him back in at any moment. So wallowing in science it is.

There aren’t many people on the floor, mostly just the people who work there and a few stubborn people who had been touring the tower when the attack started and were determined not to let their day go to waste. Steve feels eyes on him, but not the usual _wow Captain America is really here can we get an autograph_ eyes. He feels like someone is observing him, not just looking at him. Like someone in here is a crazed fan or an enemy preparing to attack.

Steve glances around to find out who’s been staring at him and sees Clint walking towards him.

Well. At least Steve knows he has some semblance of self-preservation, even though apparently it’s his teammates who set it off.

Then he realizes it: Clint is walking towards him. Clint is probably also stuck in the tower, the tower where the alien god who brainwashed him opened a portal to outer space and launched an alien invasion.

Well, Steve may as well help the both of them get their minds off things.

“Hey, Cap,” Clint says when he’s close enough not to shout.

“Hey. Wanna go watch a movie or something?” Steve asks.

“Lead the way.”

 

“What makes you think ‘Cat Meows Underwater’ is going to be so funny?”

“You just thought tiny hamsters and drunk balloon art were funny. Trust me, dude.”

 

**Seamus: Steve seriously are you okay? Please answer me**

**Seamus: sorry if I’m being rude I’m not good at asking for things but you cant just ignore someone after a robot invasion**

**Seamus: ok well I hope someone contacts me if you’re dead. I’ll go to your funeral.**

**Seamus: please don’t be dead.**

 

“Hello, children,” Natasha says as she walks into Steve’s living room. She doesn’t look entertained by ‘I Can’t Stop Manatee,’ but her unamused face is so static Steve thinks she’s forcing it in place. “Can I see you for a minute, Captain?”

Steve nods, not looking at Clint as he stands because he knows he’ll just start laughing again. Clint’s joy is contagious.

“What’s going on?” Steve asks Natasha. She nods towards his apartment door, and they walk out and to his gym. “What,” he says when they get there, “is the situation worse than Stark thought?”

“No, Steve, that’s under control,” she says, breaking the illusion of a bored agent and instead looking over Steve with concern. “First, are you okay?”

He’s surprised. Not because Natasha doesn’t care about him, of course, but because she never asks him that during or immediately after a job. They’re never okay then. It’s the price they pay for trying to help others. This time no one was hurt, no hard decisions were made. It’s about as simple of an attack as he can imagine.

“Yeah, Natasha, of course,” he says. “Are you?” Maybe she knows something about this that he doesn’t.

“What? Yeah, of course. I’m not worried about the robots, Steve, that stuff happens daily, usually just _inside_ the tower. I’m worried about you worrying about Barnes.”

Oh.

“Natasha, I just. I’m as fine as I can be about it, I guess? But. I don’t know, I don’t think. I don’t think it’s him.” His face, his body, his name, his service number, but not him. Not his timeline.

“Steve, look,” she says, voice dangerously serious yet full of concern. “I have one last thing to show you, okay? It doesn’t make sense. It’s a mess. It seems impossible. But us standing here right now? Having this conversation? You, tiny little asthmatic you born during the first world war, talking to me now, nearly one hundred years later, looking no older than thirty? Steve,” she says again, throwing her hands up in front of her, “ _none_ of this should be possible, but here we are, and denial is not going to save you any heartache.” She cuts off suddenly, like she had more to say but realized just how aggressive she was starting to sound.

Steve places a hand on her shoulder. “Okay, Natasha.” He squeezes her shoulder, asking permission, then wraps her into a hug. She’s shaking just barely noticeably. “Okay.”

 

“I knew him too, you know,” she says after Steve has stopped sobbing.

“What?”

“I knew him. He helped train me.”

“Natasha, I—”

“I wasn’t sure it was him,” she continues without letting Steve speak. “You’re right about him being a ghost story. They told us about him, about how ruthless and effective he was. That if we didn’t become like him one day, they’d send him after us.”

Steve isn’t sure he wants to know who this _they_ is.

“But when he trained me… When we fought, he was ruthless. But when we worked together in the field, when he was supposed to show me how to be a better spy, a better killer… He was so kind.”

Steve finally looks up and realizes she’s crying. He doesn’t know how long she has been. He’s been too caught up in himself.

“He always protected me. He always made sure I was safe. I was so young. I didn’t know what I was doing, not really, and he made sure to do the worst of it. He made sure to keep me away from physical harm. But when they found out. When they.” She cuts off and takes a deep breath. “He forgot me, Steve. I didn’t know how. Just that the next time we trained, he looked at me as dead and cold as when we first met. There was no light in his eyes.”

They sit there in silence a moment, grieving together.

“That’s…” Steve starts, then has to clear his throat. “That’s my Bucky. Always. Always there. Always pulling me out of harm. Never letting me see how much he hurt.”

Natasha looks at him, piercing through him and breaking him down. “You…” She doesn’t finish.

“Yeah, Natasha. I did. I loved him.”

It’s the first time he’s ever said it aloud.

 

**Seamus: is it weird that I miss you?**

**Seamus: sorry that was creepy.**

**Steve: oh my god I'm so sorry**

**Steve: yes, I’m fine, I don't think anyone was hurt**

**Steve: I'm so sorry for freaking you out things were just hectic here**

**Seamus: you're okay!**

**Seamus: i was actually really worried**

**Steve: I'm sorry :/**

**Seamus: don't worry about it i panic easy**

**Steve: are you okay?**

**Seamus: yeah, of course. Wasn't even close to it.**

**Steve: okay, good**

**Steve: i was wondering**

**Seamus: do you wanna meet?**

**Steve: oh. Yeah that's what I was going to ask.**

**Seamus: yeah, Steve, I'd love to**

**Steve: cool :) when are you free?**

**Steve: and by the way… it's Steven :)**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!!! I'm thinking two more chapters after this, then adding another work!  
> Your comments and kudos and subscriptions make me so happy. Thank you all!!!


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this has taken so long! You're all the best for being patient.  
> Ahhhh! There's only one more chapter of this! I'm probably going to take a break from it after that chapter instead of writing the next part of the series, but I promise I'll come back for it! I'm just soooo behind on my deadlines right now.  
> Enjoy!

They plan to meet in a little over a week, next Friday afternoon at a little park near Bed-Stuy, barring any other disasters. They had decided that the upcoming weekend was too soon, especially in the wake of an attempted invasion.

**Steve: I’ll keep in touch and let you know if something comes up. I promise I don’t intend to stand you up, but sometimes things get a little hectic for me.**

**Seamus: yeah i get that. don’t worry about it you live your life**

Steve feels a little bad about that. He hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about the life he lives.

**Steve: you may not like that. I’m definitely not going to be what you expect, either. Be patient with me.**

**Seamus: i’m not exactly what you’re expecting either so it’s fair.**

Steve highly doubts that.

 

In the week between the attack and his date, Steve has plenty of time to worry about Bucky. Tony has found the source of the knock-off Iron Man suits and is with Rhodes trying to address the issue. They have the entire Air Force backing them up, so they don't really need superhero assistance. Unfortunately, that leaves Steve with no distraction from the latest files.

Clint has already gone back home, no longer needed in the tower and not wanting to spend another minute there, so it’s just Steve, Natasha, and Dr. Banner working through the impossibility of it all.

“I don’t know much about the cube, Steve, and I can’t exactly call Thor and ask him to bring it over for some friendly experimentation.”

Steve has been afraid of that. “Can you just… give me your best guess? Based on what you _do_ know about it, and gamma radiation, and me?” Steve isn’t going to order him to do anything—this isn’t official Avengers business so he has no right—but he doesn’t think he’s above begging.

Dr. Banner sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose underneath his glasses. “I can try, Steve,” he says, “but I don’t want to tell you anything that isn’t true.”

“We aren’t experimenting, Bruce,” Natasha says. “All of that has already been done. We’re just asking you for a theory of _how._ ” Bless her.

Dr. Banner looks up at them. “My best guess?” Natasha shrug-nods. “Well, from what I can tell, the cube is influenced by a user’s will, but not controlled by it.”

Well, there goes any chance of anything making sense. “Excuse me, _what_?” Steve asks. “It does what?”

“Well… the only person to completely harness it was the Red Skull, right?” Dr. Banner says. “I don't know how he did it, but I think it's been difficult for everyone else to control because it has its own will. It's sentient.”

Steve looks at Natasha, who looks stiff but not surprised. She doesn't look back to him.

“And it's a portal to other universes, to space and time, yeah,” Dr. Banner continues, “and it's a giant mass of energy just waiting to be harnessed by someone. But what if it doesn't like where that someone is pointing it?”

“What the fuck…” Steve whispers, but no one pays him any attention.

“So my best guess? Schmidt used the cube’s energy to power his weapons. You said victims completely disappeared when shot, right?”

Steve nods slowly. “Like they were disintegrated, yeah.”

“Well,” Dr. Banner says, “I think the energy Schmidt managed to harness shot them to another dimension, likely killing them in the process.” He pauses like he's trying to gather his thoughts. “He wanted to be a god. You've told us those stories, we’ve all heard those stories. And you said when he grabbed the cube on the _Valkyrie_ that you saw space. So what if when he wasn't focusing the cube on weapons, it was focusing on his desire to become a god?”

Steve can feel his forehead crinkled in a painful sort of disbelief.

“And Barnes attacked Schmidt while he was holding the cube. Did he touch it? The cube?”

“Yeah,” Steve breathes out, unable to do much more.

“Well, I think the cube somehow… sought out what Barnes was thinking when he touched it and took them there. It can open portals to other dimensions and influence time; why wouldn’t it be able to travel through time? Moving through it just like it can move through dimensions?”

_Because that would be fucking impossible,_ Steve wants to say, but here he is in the twenty-first century, young and fit, despite being born in 1918, so he keeps his mouth shut.

“Based on the files and what we know about the cube, I think it chose to send them where Barnes was thinking, not Schmidt. Which is how they ended up back in the war but a few years earlier.”

Damn, if Steve doesn't need a drink.

 

“So let me get this straight,” Tony says when they get a chance to call him, “your not-dead boyfriend _time-traveled_ back to the war, got himself captured, and was brainwashed into killing dozens of innocent people.”

Steve suppresses a flinch. “Uh… yes?”

“Jesus fucking Christ on a unicycle, what the _fuck_.”

Steve can relate.

 

“So how do you want to find him?” Natasha asks after Steve has had a solid several hours to lose his damn mind again. “Do you want to observe, or do you want to bring him in?”

“Neither. He's his own person and I don't think I can just walk in and tear his life apart after that's been done to him so many times.” Steve is lying, of course. He wants nothing more than to scoop Bucky out of whatever horror story he may be living in and fix it all for him, but what if he's not alive, what if they caught him again what if he doesn't remember Steve what if he killed himself what if Steve doesn't want to know what's happened to him what if

“ _Steve_ ,” Natasha says, approaching slowly before putting her tiny arm around his tense shoulders. It would probably be a hilarious scene to look at, the juxtaposition of her small frame comforting his giant one, if Steve could muster the energy for humor right now. “Steve, look. They sent him to take you out during the war and he never did. He finally escaped from them a few years ago. There are records of almost every mission in between him rebelling, him fighting back. They couldn't take that from him. Even if he doesn't know you, do you really think he'd kill you? He's been off the grid for years. He doesn't do that anymore.”

Steve takes a leveling breath and nods. “Just give me time, okay? I don't know how I want to go about this yet. He's… he's not my Bucky anymore. I need to remember that before I rush in.”

Natasha squeezes then separates from him, nods, and walks away. Steve wishes she hadn't left.

 

At Clint’s, Steve can pretend he isn't breaking down inside about Bucky.

Instead he can openly break down about his date with Seamus.

“Is it even a date? We never called it a date, we haven't said anything about that or _anything_ , what if I'm reading this wrong?”

“Dude,” Clint says when Steve finally stops for air, “why don't you just ask him?”

What a simple solution. Except. “What? No! I can't do that, what if it turns out that it _isn't_ and I'm weird for thinking it is? Or, or what if he thinks it's _obviously_ a date and is offended that I even had to ask and cancels on me?”

“Wow, man. You're an expert strategist who doesn't even know how to tell if a guy likes you. Makes me feel better about myself.”

Steve shoots him a glare, then continues to freak out to him.

“Look,” Clint says eventually, “you like him, right?”

“Well… yeah, kind of. We don’t really know each other, but I like him so far.”

“That’s what the date is for. Find out if you work. And if not, maybe you get a friend out of it. Is that so bad?”

In theory, no, not so bad. But Steve manages to fuck up everything he does. He’d manage to make Seamus hate him.

“Okay, whatever, I can see you trying to make something bad out of this and I’m not letting you. What’re you gonna wear?”

The abrupt topic shift startles Steve out of a meltdown of self-hatred and into a meltdown of _holy fuck what is the appropriate attire for a first date he’s never done this before_.

“Oh, jeez,” Clint mutters, shaking his head. “Who knew Captain America was such a fucking disaster.”

Steve half laughs, half groans as he sinks to the floor, fully prepared to roll around in his misery.

 

After a few hours and a lot of googling, they decide on an outfit that Steve can put together from the clothes in his closet instead of buying new clothes.

(He tells himself he’s in too deep if he buys clothes for this, ignoring how much he’s already freaked out.)

“Dude,” Clint says, stretching the word out, “I have _seen_ you in that shirt and you are fuckin’ _cut._ Definitely wear it.”

Steve covers his sputter with a snort and decides to tease Clint back. “Nice to know I can turn a man, Barton.”

Clint doesn't miss a beat. “You didn't _turn_ me anything, and even if I was straight I'd have to be _blind_ not to appreciate that.”

Ignoring Clint’s halfway-coming-out, Steve says, “ah, I forgot, you're only deaf. Funny how you pretend to be blind when I try to sign to you from across a room.”

Clint shoves him, hard, and they fall into laughter and a slap fight like two teenagers. It's nice.

 

“Hey,” Clint says when Steve is winning at Mario Kart, “does he know you're Captain America?”

Steve knows Clint did this to distract him, he _knows,_ but he still falls for it. “Shit,” he says, and drops his controller half in response to Clint and half in anger at the blue shell that just ruined his winning streak.

 

“So how are you sure he isn't Hydra or something?” Clint asks.

“I'm not,” Steve says, “but I have faith. I don't believe that people are inherently bad. I'm sure he's done his share of bad things. He was in the military and doesn't want to talk about it. But that means he likely has his regrets, and regretting harm you've done doesn't sound like Hydra to me.”

Clint whistles a little. “You sure have more faith in humanity than I do, Cap,” he says. “But he still has to find out who you are somehow. Either you tell him before you meet, or you wait to see how he reacts in person.”

“Yeah, well, if he reacts poorly then he probably isn't someone I wanna bother with.”

“Don't be so sure, man. Expecting a nice guy who has his life together then meeting you? It's a shocker.”

Steve flings his ice cream spoon at him.

 

“Welcome home, Captain,” JARVIS says as Steve gets in the elevator. “Agent Romanov wanted me to inform you that she has found something. Shall I take you to her?”

“Please,” Steve says, shifting from Steve Rogers into Captain America.

When he arrives on Natasha’s floor, she’s waiting for him. “How was the playdate?”

“Great, there were only three temper tantrums. What did you find?”

“I think I've located an old hideout for him. Might even explain some things, but you’re definitely going to have more questions.”

“Well?”

“I may have found proof that he was hiding out in Bucharest for some time. Near that Hydra safehouse and storage that collapsed on us a few weeks ago.”

“What? We were that close to him?” Steve hadn’t even known Bucky was still alive then, much less that close. What would he have done? Not hit that facility? And for what, Bucky not to remember him, to flee from the place he may have been calling home?

“Relax, sightings of him in the area stopped years ago. Residents and vendors at the local markets said they stopped seeing him, and most of them said it was a shame, that he left without saying goodbye, because he was so helpful and so kind.”

“So why tell me this now?” Steve asks.

“Because there’s no evidence he’s been back to his safehouse, as we can’t pinpoint it, but we have reason to believe he’d been back to that storage facility.”

“What proof do you have? And who is _we_ ?” Steve is done with this. He wants answers _now_.

“JARVIS and I have been searching through everything we can. He pulled up readings from the day we were there and any footage he can access from the time Hydra maintained it. We’re piecing some things together.”

Steve isn’t sure he’s comfortable with the way Natasha keeps referring to JARVIS as a _he_ , since he only recently got used to JARVIS being a bodiless AI, but he ignores that twinge of discomfort for now. “What have you concluded?”

“Captain,” JARVIS says, “none of this is certain, but it is likely that Sergeant Barnes had been staking out the facility, gathering supplies while trying to determine how to destroy it.”

“We think maybe Barnes is the one who rigged it to blow,” Natasha says.

“Remotely?” Steve asks, because if not Bucky _was_ there and he tried to kill them but he also tried to kill Hydra and if he doesn’t know Steve isn’t that all he can expect?

“Maybe, but we aren’t sure,” Natasha says. “We have to see what else we can find. I just thought you should know that he’s tried to take down some of Hydra at least once since he escaped.”

“What do you need me to do?” Steve asks. He’s ready to do just about anything he can.

“We don’t know enough to act on anything yet,” she says. “As soon as I know, I’ll tell you.”

Steve nods sharply, not sure what to do now. He looks at Natasha, who looks sympathetic, and remembers how she had cried when she talked about the Bucky she knew. He relaxes his posture, nods again more gently, and turns to leave.

 

By Friday morning, they have no more leads on where Bucky may be, except that he’s definitely not in Bucharest.

“Footage has not identified anyone matching his description, and I have not identified anyone who carries their body weight the way he does. He is most likely not there.”

JARVIS is extremely helpful for surveillance.

Still, there isn’t much Steve can do at this point besides brainstorm with Natasha and talk about how to approach him if they ever do find him.

“He’s killed no one but Hydra agents since he escaped, Steve. He isn’t likely to remember me, but if he does, do you really think he’s going to take kindly to another ex-assassin trying to convince him to join her? I can’t be there.”

That’s the only conclusion they come to: Steve has to be the one to talk to him.

So when they have nothing solid by Friday morning, Natasha says, “Go, I know you have that date thing this afternoon. Don’t act like you don’t, you suck at keeping secrets and Clint told me.” Steve groans. “Go get ready. This will keep. Go relax and get all spiffy so you don’t ruin this.”

“Natasha,” Steve says seriously, “no one says _spiffy._  I don’t think I even said _spiffy_ in the thirties.”

“Just _go_ ,” she says as she shoves him. Well, if she’s going to be so polite about it.

Two hours later, he’s back at Natasha’s apartment, clad in a red henley and grey slacks. “How do I look?” he asks her.

“Spiffy.”

He was asking for that one.

 

**Steve: I’m on my way over from Manhattan, I’ll tell you when I’m closer**

**Seamus: okay cool. Sorry to make you come all this way. Maybe we can meet closer to you next time.**

Steve takes it as a good sign that Seamus is already hoping for a _next time_.

**Steve: sure, if that’s convenient for you :)**

**Seamus: it’s no problem**

**Seamus: oh and I’m the guy with long hair wearing a leather jacket and boots**

**Steve: red henley and sunglasses. you’ll know me when you see me.**

Which isn’t a lie. Steve is recognizable if you’re looking for him.

**Seamus: cool :) see you soon**

 

This is not what Steve was expecting.

About an hour later, Steve sees a man sitting on a bench in the park where they agreed to meet. He matches the description Seamus gave him, but as Steve gets closer, he assumes he must be wrong. Steve can only see the man from the side, and he’s had his mind on only one thing lately, so he’s projecting. Clearly.

Still. “Seamus?” Steve asks, and the man straightens up but doesn’t turn around.

“Yeah! Steve?” he says while Steve walks towards him. The voice is far too familiar for comfort, and Steve realizes he’s never heard Seamus’s voice before.

“Seamus… Seamus. _James_?”

He turns to face Steve, a hesitant smile on his face. He looks prepared to bolt.

“Hi, Steve.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM SO SORRY THIS IS UP SO LATE I'VE BEEN OUT OF TOWN AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE OUT OF TOWN FOR ANOTHER WEEK I'M SO SORRY  
> Last chapter!!! I hope this was all worth it for this nonsense! I enjoyed writing it and while I'm really behind on my personal writing (should have had that done yesterday and didn't... oops), this has been a great way for me to face writer's block! Thank you so much for being so supportive through it all!

“Bucky, I looked for you, we've been looking for you, we're using the most advanced and expensive intelligence and surveillance equipment in the _history of the world_ to find you!”

“Steve, don't make a scene in public. Please.” Steve feels a rush at the sound of his name on Bucky’s lips. He never thought he'd hear it again. “If you want to talk about this, I have a place nearby. If not… I can leave, Steve.” Bucky looks down and away from Steve, looking ashamed and afraid.

“No,” Steve breathes out. “No, Bucky, I could never ask you to leave. We can go wherever you want.” He doesn't know what to do, he wants to rush to Bucky, grab his hands, wrap him in his arms and never let go. But he doesn't know what Bucky wants.

“Do you want to come to my house, or do you want to get a meal? Which will be easier?”

Steve decides he must have died long ago, or that this is all at the very least a fever dream. He'll wake up or he'll die, but either way, he's in 1940s Brooklyn, having the strangest dream of all time because none of this can be real.

 

He doesn't wake up.

Bucky takes him to a cute ice cream parlor, then back to the house he's living in.

“The woman I live with is downstairs, but you can come up anyway. We can talk.”

Steve is losing his mind while eating peanut butter cookie dough ice cream.

Bucky’s tiny floor, with just a bedroom and a bathroom, is beautifully organized and extremely efficient for the small space. A tiny cat with a huge fluffy tail meows at Bucky as he reaches the top step and winds around his legs affectionately.

“Hey, Sacha,” Bucky says, laughter in his voice. “Go downstairs to see Patricia, she’d love to see you.” He bends over to scratch behind the cat’s ears, then picks it up and puts it on the stairs, patting at its butt to get it to move down.

Steve finds it all incredibly endearing.

“You can go ahead in the bedroom, sit on the bed or at the desk if you want.”

Steve walks in and takes in the place. There are plants in the window, a small desk stacked with books on one side and some basic tools on the other. There’s no art or photos on the walls, but the desk and colorful bedspread and plants make the place feel like a home. More like a home than Steve’s place in DC ever was.

“Cute cat,” Steve says for lack of anything else to say.

Bucky chuckles a little. “Yeah, he’s such a good little guy.” He sits on his bed stiffly.

In the past half hour, with how insistent Bucky was that they go to a particular ice cream parlor and how sweet he is with his cat and how homey his room is, Steve has almost forgotten that Bucky is traumatized, that he was a brutal killer forced to forget himself and anything that has ever mattered to him so that he could instead become Hydra’s weapon.

He realizes that Bucky is coping well in ways Steve never has.

“Bucky,” Steve starts, only to be cut off.

“I don’t know who that is.”

Steve is struck breathless. “What?”

“I… I wasn’t lying when I said I was trying to figure out who I was after my time at war. I didn’t say which war, which military, but… I wasn’t lying. I don’t know who I am. I’m not sure I’m your _Bucky_ , Steve. I don’t know him. I know his face, I’ve read his history, sometimes I have some of his memories, but… I don’t think I’m him.”

“Of course you are,” Steve says, “who else could you be? No one can take away who you were no matter what they do to you. You’re still the same person.”

“I’m still the same _body_ , Steve,” Bucky says, “but I’m not the same person. They took that from me a thousand times over, and if they got me back they’d do it again. I’d forget it all. All this, all that I’ve done in these years.”

Steve hears that he’s leaving something out. “Except…?”

“Except _you_ , Steve. They never truly made me forget you.”

 

Bucky had moved to New York from Romania after the Battle of New York. He had seen Steve’s face on screens, gotten echoes of memories that had been tapping into him his whole free life. He got up and followed them.

While he had been in Romania, he tried to reshape himself, rediscover himself. He realized quickly that staying in one place meant needing a name.

“I remembered you, just fragments of some of our earliest memories together,” he told Steve. “Your mom… Sarah, she used to call me _Seamus_. She couldn’t quite pronounce _James_ , so she took the Irish version, right?”

“Yeah, Bucky,” Steve had said around his tears.

As Seamus Brenneis, an Irish German-Austrian migrant to Romania, he made a life until New York.

“I thought I was insane, Steve. I thought I was delusional, but there you were on screen, and I thought, _even if the memories are fake, he isn’t. I need to find him_.”

He moved to New York, which created more echoes that didn’t feel quite right, and found Patricia.

“When I saw about Washington, I couldn’t get up and leave. I love it here. Ms. Patricia is so nice to me and I… I didn’t want to lose that.”

It paid off when a few weeks later he saw Steve on Tinder.

“You were right here, you were so close. It had to be you. My brain went nuts seeing that picture of you laughing, I knew it had to be you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Steve asks.

“Would you have believed me?”

Steve doesn’t know. Crazier things have happened.

 

He steps out after a while to text Natasha and Sam.

**SR: I found him.**

**NR: Your date?**

**NR: Or Barnes?**

Steve reads it as playful, but who knows what she means.

**SR: both?**

**SW: whoa calm down a second steve found WHO now???**

**NR: He had a date, didn’t he tell you?**

**SW: yeah but he didn’t say WHEN Steve you shit**

**NR: wow you’re a shitty friend**

**SR: guys can we focus???**

**SR: I found Bucky.**

**NR: you’re serious about that?**

**SW: dude why don’t you tell me anything**

**SR: IM TELLING YOU NOW**

**SR: I FOUND HIM**

**NR: uh the HOW would be nice?? where is he? do you need backup?**

**SW: dont tell me you need flying backup i’m like 4 hours away**

**NR: how fast do the wings go?**

**SW: I don’t know seeing as they’re still in tony fuckin stark’s lab i hate yall**

**SW: STEVE ARE YOU ALIVE**

**SR: yes okay guys calm down just**

**SR: Seamus is Bucky**

**NR: ?????????????**

**SW: HA**

**SW: YOU GOT CATFISHED**

**SW: BY YOUR DEAD BEST FRIEND**

**SW: YOU AREN’T JOKING??**

**SR: no**

**SW: THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE**

 

After he mutes Sam and calls Natasha, Steve decides to go back inside to tell Bucky he should head back to the tower.

“You’re leaving?” Bucky asks. “Can I see you again, or…?”

Steve backtracks. “No, Bucky, I meant to ask if. You wanted to come with me?”

Bucky looks simultaneously relieved and terrified. “Oh.”

“Not forever… I’d never take you from your home. But… there’s someone who wants to meet you. See you. Again.”

Despite his obvious discomfort, Bucky agrees. “Can we take the car, though?” he asks. “The subway freaks me out.”

“Yeah, buddy, of course,” Steve says. He would do anything for Bucky, including asking his landlord if they can borrow her car.

 

“You’re older than I am, mister, so knock it off,” Patricia says as she hands him the keys. “I know reaction time starts to go at your age so be careful. You better not scratch my baby.”

Steve likes her.

 

Driving to Midtown on a Friday afternoon means waiting in traffic forever. Steve needs to fill the relative silence.

“Hey,” he starts so that he doesn’t startle Bucky, “tell me… Tell me about you.”

Bucky looks at him, confused, then says, “Steve. You’ve known me forever. I’m the one with memory problems.”

Steve wishes he could laugh at that, but he can’t. It’s still too fresh for him to find it funny. “No, I mean… You said you aren’t the Bucky I know. So. Tell me about you. About… about Seamus.”

He lights up. “I’ve already told you some stuff. I like to cook, mostly to bake. I’m not always good at it, though. It’s always undercooked, and if it isn’t, I always forget to put some ingredient in it.” Steve chuckles as he remembers the muffin incident. “I can make a meal, but for some reason I can’t make dessert.”

Steve glances over to him and sees the half-frown he’s been missing since the 1940s. “Yeah? Have you tried making ice cream?”

Bucky looks at him and breaks into a grin slowly. Steve looks back to the traffic in front of him, thankful that he driving so he’s got an excuse. “No,” Bucky says, “I haven’t. Maybe I’d be better at that.”

“Can’t undercook it,” Steve says. He loves hearing Bucky’s laugh.

“Yeah.” He clears his throat. “I, uh, I work home repair. Around the neighborhood. Anything someone needs done, I do it it. I install dishwashers and ceiling fans and paint rooms and rewire houses and stuff. It’s fun. It doesn’t pay nearly enough to give Ms. Patricia the rent she deserves, but it’s fun.”

Bucky had always loved making things, even though he was never really good at it. Steve remembers many failed inventions made from any trash they could find. He’s glad that part of Bucky survived.

“Um, I got Sacha because he was wandering around the area. He seemed fine, but I didn’t want him to get hurt. We couldn’t find an owner, so we kept him.” He smiles. “He’s an idiot. He whines at us for food when there’s a whole bowl right in front of him. I don’t know how he survived this long without us.”

“How old was he when you found him?” Steve asks.

“We don’t know, but the vet thought a year or two.” He’s quiet for a second, still smiling. “What about you?”

“What about me what?” Steve asks.

“Do you… have any pets or anything? Tell me about you.”

Oh. “No, I don’t. Things are too unstable for that. You know. Things haven’t changed that much.”

“The whole world isn’t at war, Steve,” Bucky says.

“Doesn’t mean that I get a break.”

They’re quiet the rest of the ride.

 

“Captain,” JARVIS says as they walk in. “Shall I mark your guest as such, or should I put his information in the system?”

Bucky looks up at the ceiling in the private-entrance lobby, then looks around. “Who is that? I don’t see any signs of cameras.”

“My name is JARVIS, Sergeant,” JARVIS says. “I am Mr. Stark’s personal assistant, of a sort.”

“‘Of a sort,’” Bucky echoes.

“JARVIS is an AI,” Steve says. “Significantly more intelligent than its creator.”

“While true, I don’t think Mr. Stark would take kindly to that observation,” JARVIS says. Bucky snorts. “If I may make a suggestion, Captain: I will put Sergeant Barnes in my system as normal, but not allow him access to any of the facilities without another member of the immediate Stark Industries executives or the Avengers being present or having given prior permission.”

Steve blinks for the second it takes to understand what JARVIS is saying, then agrees. “Thank you, JARVIS.”

“My pleasure, Captain.” The elevator doors open. “Shall I take you to Agent Romanov?”

“Please.”

Beside him, Bucky looks confused. “What just happened?”

“JARVIS made you… part of the family, I guess? So that you can access the private sections of the tower at any time with permission.”

“Oh.” He doesn’t say anything else.

Until the door opens on Natasha’s floor.

“Natasha!” Steve calls as he looks into her gym space. She isn’t there, but a few seconds later her front door opens.

“Hey, Steve,” she says, and Bucky freezes beside Steve.

 

“I’m glad you got out…” Bucky says.

Natasha leans forward in her seat and looks him in the eye. “I’m glad you did, too, James.”Natalia,” he says, and Steve is still caught off guard by their history. “I was there for too long. I feel like I never got out.”

Natasha moves to touch him hand, but he flinches away almost imperceptibly. She withdraws. “You didn’t have a choice, doll,” she says. “You never would have done it as _you._ ”

“Sure,” Bucky says. “But I still did.”

 

Bucky decides to leave soon after his talk with Natasha. Steve invites him to his floor before he goes.

“Sure,” Bucky says, “I may as well see how you've been getting along without me this whole time.”

He doesn’t tell Bucky how bad he’s been, since the lack of personality in his apartment should be enough.

“This is real nice, Steve,” Bucky says, taking in the view of Manhattan from Steve’s living room window. Neither of them say anything else for what feels like a long time.

Bucky turns to face Steve, who tries to hide that he was staring at Bucky and not New York City. He doubts he’s successful.

“I’m going to go,” Bucky says quietly.

“I can drive you back,” Steve says. “I can take the subway or a cab back. I don’t mind.”

Bucky steps in closer to Steve. “I’m not going to make you do that,” he says. He hesitates. “Besides, we know where to find each other, right?”

Steve nods, unable to speak with how close Bucky now is to him.

“Listen, Steve,” Bucky says, and Steve hears a change in his voice that he can’t identify yet makes him feel sixteen again, realizing what Bucky meant to him, _really_ realizing, for the first time. “I… I remember some things. Things that aren’t in the books, things I can’t find in museums or online. Things about you. Me. And I…” He trails off, and Steve desperately wants him to finish that thought, but he also never wants to move again.

“Yeah?” he manages to get out after a few seconds of silence.

“I know… I know this wasn’t how it was, and I know that so many things have changed. I’ve changed. Enough that there were times that I didn’t know myself, but. I always knew you.” He laughs. “Hell, I’ve shot me to protect you.” Steve isn’t following, can’t focus on what Bucky is saying when he’s so close, when he’s _alive_ and he’s _here_ and he gets to hear that voice again, not screaming, not through some recording, but _Bucky’s_ voice. “And I… you would think that says enough, but I can’t stop. I have to say something because if now is it, if this is all I ever get, I want to remember this. I’ve never forgotten you, never could, but I want to _remember._ ”

Steve breathes out and moves closer, just barely not touching Bucky. He hasn’t touched him yet, not since 1945. He isn’t sure how to anymore. “What do you need from me? Anything. If I can do it, I will.”

“Just. This, Steve. This.”

And his lips are on Steve’s, and Steve is overwhelmed for a moment, not knowing what to do, then panicking because _Bucky what if he thinks I’d hate him what if he ends it and runs what if he thinks I haven’t wanted this for years and_

He kisses him back, gets a solid second, and then Bucky pulls away. Steve is stuck there, not knowing what to do, when Bucky grabs the car keys out of his hand and heads to the door. He’s out, silent, before Steve can turn around.

 

**Seamus: Here. You can call me if you want so we don’t always have to talk on here**

His phone number is attached. Steve smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHHH I'M SORRY THERE ARE SOME THINGS NOT FULLY EXPLAINED
> 
> To those of you interested, I did an outline from Bucky's perspective and I realized when writing the second chapter of this that Bucky's perspective is probably more interesting and gives better explanations for things. So I may write that, too! Or a sequel, who knows. If you want to see either, let me know, although I'm probably gonna write them anyway even if no one says anything. However, I do need to stop writing this and work on the novel I'm SUPPOSED to be writing for a while instead, so there will be a break before I publish anything else. Sorry, the joy I get from reading your comments doesn't pay the bills :(
> 
> Real talk for a second, y'all: even though your comments don't pay the bills, they make me so happy. As you can imagine, as a writer (and student! Still a student, too!) I don't have a ton of money, and I'm stressed a lot. I've got my own share of mental health issues, but I don't think anything has ever made me as happy as reading what y'all have had to say about my work. Thank you all so much. If you write, I promise once I get my life back on track that I'll read and comment on some of your stuff because the joy you have given me must be repaid somehow. Thank you all so much!!! <3

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can follow me at my freshly-made tumblr @MrsCalculation to talk to me, make requests, or just make me feel better about my follower count.


End file.
